


Crowley and His Army of Grandmothers

by burnt_oranges



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Pining, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), after the apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:20:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23800678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnt_oranges/pseuds/burnt_oranges
Summary: Crowley had impulsively stopped by Artisan Du Chocolate, the next place on Aziraphale’s meticulously ordered list of chocolatiers to sample, and now Crowley wonders--is it too much? He had bought a hundred fucking pounds’ worth of chocolate, of course it’s too much, but would Aziraphale notice that it was too much?That is the question.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 96
Kudos: 197





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> anyway, sorry in advance for...how many footnotes there are
> 
> cw: WWII-era violence toward a child that is remembered in some detail by crowley

Crowley loiters outside the bookshop, hands in his ridiculously tight pockets, fingertips brushing the chocolates nestled in one of the interdimensional space pockets he had to install ([1]) if he ever wanted to carry anything larger than a tic tac ([2]). He had impulsively stopped by Artisan Du Chocolate, the next place on Aziraphale’s meticulously ordered list of chocolatiers to try and then ruthlessly rank according to a criterion that possessed at least twenty-three composite parts, and now Crowley wonders--is it too much? He had bought a hundred fucking pounds’ worth of chocolate, of course it’s too much, but would Aziraphale _notice_ that it was too much?

That is the question. ([3])

The door opens suddenly, and Crowley almost crushes the chocolates in surprise. Aziraphale says, exasperated, “Crowley, just get in here already, you’ve been out there for ten minutes.”

“I’m scaring away the customers,” Crowley shouts, gesturing with the hand that didn’t have a death grip on the chocolates.

“By thinking too much, I see,” Aziraphale says, voice dry. He opens the door wider, and Crowley can see that he’s wearing his traveling clothes even though no one wears special clothes for traveling anymore. “Another ground-breaking innovation for the demonic books.”

Crowley slides down his sunglasses and glares at him with squinted eyes. Aziraphale stares back ([4]). Crowley flicks out his forked tongue with a little hiss. “I’m shaking in my boots,” Aziraphale says, droll.

“If you’re going to be so mean to me,” Crowey says, sticking his nose in the air and flouncing into the shop, “I won’t give you your present.”

“Ooh, a present!” Aziraphale says excitedly, clapping his hands. “What’s the occasion?”

“The—why—why, our drive to Tadfield!” Crowley says, improvising.

“Oh, a winter solstice gift!” Aziraphale says, smiling widely, boyish. Oh, how Crowley’s heart—he could admit he had a heart now, after the Apoca-wasn’t—cracks open at that smile, every time, like dying. “How delightful.”

“Yes, yes, it’s a winter solstice gift,” Crowley says, too loud, sweating in relief.

“Isn’t it a bit early to give it to me now though?” Aziraphale says, fretting. “Everyone’s exchanging gifts tomorrow.”

“It’s a—a pre-gift, nothing special, your real gift’s in the car,” Crowley says, and miracles a random item from his Aziraphale gift stash ([5]) into the back of the Bentley. “So you know—you could have it now, it won’t hurt anything, I only paid like, fifteen quid for it.”

“I shouldn’t,” Aziraphale says, biting his lip, his eyes zeroing in on Crowley’s person like a hawk, visually raiding him for the location of the chocolates.

Crowley removes the chocolates from his interdimensional space pocket and lifts the box up to his nose to take off the lid as lasciviously as possible, ignoring Aziraphale’s muted sigh of aggravation. “Well, someone’s going to have to eat them,” Crowley says speculatively, poking one chocolate, and then picking up another one to give it a little smell-test with his snake tongue. “Hmm, bergamot-flavoured? With hints of—oh, yes, lavender.” Crowley waits. “Don’t seem to be any volunteers, guess I’ll have to—”

“Oh, just give them here,” Aziraphale says irritably, holding out one well-manicured hand.

Crowley shrugs one shoulder in a Gallic fashion meant to remind Aziraphale of his poorly conceived crepe expedition. “One only had to ask,” Crowley says virtuously.

“And those crepes were worth all those little gaffes,” Aziraphale says righteously, grasping the chocolates and setting them on the counter next to an assorted collection of ludicrously wrapped presents—the paper itself is ghastly with snowmen sporting freakishly large smiles that made them look absolutely unhinged and which Aziraphale probably thought were cute. The wrapping job itself looked like a very uncoordinated five year old did it. Crowley loves him so much, he disgusts himself.

“Aren’t you going to have a chocolate?” Crowley says, sucking in air through his teeth and flinging himself into a chair.

“Patience is a virtue,” Aziraphale says, waving his hand so that the gifts, five bottles of wine, a carefully curated selection of books, and an over-sized black wool sweater packed themselves neatly into a little basket.

“Uh-huh,” Crowley says, raising his eyebrows.

“Can’t get chocolate on the books,” Aziraphale says, going up on the balls of his feet with barely suppressed excitement, before inspecting the chocolates for his first victim.

“What’s the sweater for anyway?” Crowley says, swinging his legs over the arm of the chair. “Are you actually—” he gasps loudly, “—going to update your—”

“It’s for you,” Aziraphale says, picking up a chocolate and not even deigning to look at Crowley. “If I have to hear about how cold you are one more time—"

“I’m cold-blooded ang-Aziraphale!” Crowley protests, valiantly hoping Aziraphale hadn’t noticed the slip-up ([6]). As Aziraphale was currently in the middle of pornographically eating his chocolate, Crowley figured he was safe.

Aziraphale has turned the truffle into two separate bites and he chews slowly, eyes closed, a smile of transcendence on his face, like he has traveled to a place that is far more special and beautiful than anywhere he has been before. Crowley wishes Aziraphale would smile at him like that. “I’m sorry, Crowley, what was it you were saying?” he says after swallowing.

“Nothing,” Crowley says, defeated. “I wasn’t saying anything.”

“Shall we go?” Aziraphale says, picking up the basket and donning his cream-coloured Panama hat with the blue ribbon that matched his bowtie.

Crowley looks at him for a long moment—Aziraphale’s silly hat and his silly basket and his clever blue eyes-- and wonders if this is what an aneurysm feels like.

“Are you all right?” Aziraphale says, peering up at him.

“You got something right here,” Crowley says, pointing his finger a hair’s breadth away from Aziraphale’s waistcoat.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale says, instantly looking down. “This is practically new, my goodness, it’s from the fifties—"

Crowley immediately flicks Aziraphale’s nose with his finger—who slowly looks up at him like the demon from _The Exorcist_ \-- and Crowley runs away to the Bentley, cackling, before Aziraphale can get his revenge.

Crowley is wiping tears from his eyes as Aziraphale finally trundles into the car. “I can’t believe you fell for it! Again!” Crowley says and starts laughing again. “I’ve done it a million times.” ([7])

“I want you to know that I’m a being of goodness,” Aziraphale informs him, wearing the incredibly unimpressed and judgmental face that Crowley will do anything to get because it satisfies him so deeply on a spiritual level, “so I will kindly not retaliate.”

Crowley takes this to mean he has a day’s reprieve before all of his coffee becomes a disgusting health food drink.

“Are you ready to go?” Crowley says, putting his sunglasses back into place.

“No,” Aziraphale says grimly, having fastened several extra seatbelts over himself.

“Onward forth!” Crowley yells before tearing out into traffic while Aziraphale clutches his box of chocolates and the side of the door.

Crowley entertains himself the whole ride to Tadfield by slowing down just enough for Aziraphale to consider the chocolate on his lap with narrowed eyes, and even slip a finger under the lid, before speeding back up again. Once, he even lets Aziraphale get the chocolate actually in his hand.

“Crowley, you horrible demon,” Aziraphale says in despair.

“Ah, music to my ears!” Crowley shouts over Freddie Mercury, grinning maniacally.

“Bebop to your ears,” Aziraphale grumbles, pouting, and Crowley finally slows down enough for Aziraphale to eat and enjoy the whole thing.

“Someone once told me patience is a virtue,” Crowley says in a far-off tone, as they park near Jasmine cottage. “I can’t remember who it was though—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve had your fun,” Aziraphale says, rolling his eyes. He fusses with his basket of gifts while Crowley retrieves his gift for Aziraphale from the back of the Bentley. “I suppose you didn’t bother buying any gifts on your own for the children.”

“What are you talking about?” Crowley says, facing Aziraphale. “Those are joint gifts in that basket.”

“Of course they are,” Aziraphale says, his voice as dry as the Sahara ([8]). “Shall we, then?”

Crowley wants to hold out his arm for Aziraphale with such an intensity that his muscles and teeth lock up--and then he has to hurry because Aziraphale is already trotting up to the door without waiting for an answer. Typical.

Aziraphale knocks—shave and a haircut, two bits—and Newt answers, looking like he has seen things that can never be unseen, and also covered in flour. “Come in?” he says, like he’s trying to guess the correct answer on a multiple choice test.

“My good fellow, are you all right?” Aziraphale asks.

“I’m making fruit cake?” Newt says, looking even more strained.

“Ooh, which version?” Aziraphale says. “Roman or Middle Ages?”

“Fruitcake?” Newt says, his voice going higher.

“Why don’t we go inside, I’ll assist you,” Aziraphale says, taking pity on Newt.

“Oh, thank god,” Newt says, his shoulders collapsing from around his ears. “I’ve been cooking for days—hey, Crowley—Mr. Crowley? Mr. Demon? Sir Crowley?--is that a circle in Hell?”

“Mr. Crowley is fine,” Crowley drawls and then rubs his ribs where Aziraphale has “accidentally” elbowed him.

“Don’t listen to him, call him Crowley,” Aziraphale says, beelining to the kitchen.

“They don’t really go in for the mental torture,” Crowley admits. “Not very sophisticated, Hell.”

“Huh,” Newt says, following Aziraphale into the kitchen. “Sounds like they’re really missing a big market.”

“You’re telling me,” Crowley says feelingly, leaning against the doorframe to watch Aziraphale salvage whatever atrocities Newt had committed upon the poor fruitcake.

“What are you doing?” Newt whispers after a long period of Aziraphale doing nothing but mumbling and swishing his fingers.

“I am isolating components of the cake, convincing them it is in their best interests to travel back in time—the wet ingredients are particularly unhappy with you--and then redoing that particular step in the recipe,” Aziraphale explains, as the cake slowly looks more palatable.

“Wow,” Newt says, nodding, looking like he’d like to take notes.

“Welcome!” Anathema says from behind them, startling only Newt, her clothes and hair completely soaked like she had just gone for a quick swim. “I am so sorry I didn’t greet you earlier, the sink sprung a leak.”

“Not a problem at all, my dear,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley feels a reflexive pain in his stomach because Aziraphale hadn’t called him his dear in—in longer than he would like to think about. “I’m almost finished with the cake and then I can accompany you upstairs to help with the sink.”

“Crowley can’t help?” Newt says innocently, his shoulders slowly rising to his ears the longer Crowley glares at him.

Aziraphale snorts. “Crowley has the repair skills of a knapsack. Don’t look at me like that, Crowley, you remember what happened in 1952 with the bookshop wiring, I had to close for two entire months!”

“And you were so sad about that, weren’t you, having all your books to yourself,” Crowley snipes, and Aziraphale looks at Anathema like he’s on _The Office_. “Come, book-girl, I’ll deal with your blessed sink.”

Crowley does not deal with Anathema’s blessed sink. Instead, he sits on the toilet and lights a cigarette.

“What are you waiting for?” Anathema says, narrowing her eyes at Crowley.

“Aziraphale,” he says, shameless.

Anathema stares at him with all the judgment that Crowley imagines Agnes Nutter was capable of and then she sighs, pushing her sodden hair behind her shoulders. “Give me one,” she says, sitting on the lip of the bath tub.

“Smoking is bad for you,” Crowley informs her.

Anathema wiggles her index finger, and one cigarette starts to inch its way out of his inter-dimensional space pocket. Crowley finds it a singularly unsettling sensation—it moves exactly like a worm--and so he tosses it to her, surreptitiously enhancing her health. “Your funeral,” he says conversationally.

“I have had a _day_ preparing for this party,” Anathema says, sucking on the cigarette until the tip burns orange. “This is exactly what I needed.”

“Why even host a party?” Crowley says, handing a shot of his bottom-shelf vodka to Anathema. “Sounds like a fat lot of work.”

She downs the shot all at once like it’s water, doesn’t even cough, even though Crowley knows the quality of the vodka makes it almost equivalent to paint thinner. Crowley immediately develops a curiosity regarding Anathema’s university experiences.

“It’s—it’s what you do to establish a life somewhere,” she says. “That’s what my mother always said anyway. You throw a party. You invite people you like, you eat with them.”

“Like young Newton?” Crowley says dryly.

“He’s only a year younger than me,” Anathema says, a little sulky, firmly placing the shot glass on the window sill.

“You’re all young to me,” Crowley says, putting out his cigarette in the shot glass and vanishing both.

“Yoo-hoo,” Aziraphale says, lightly knocking on the doorframe.

“You don’t need to knock, a—Aziraphale,” Crowley says, stuffing his hands in his inter-dimensional space pockets.

“I don’t want to interrupt anything.” Aziraphale sniffs. “Like illicit cigarette smoking,” he says pointedly.

“Oh come on,” Crowley says, throwing his head back against the wall, “it’s been twenty years since I lost that bet.” ([9])

“A promise is a promise,” Aziraphale says severely, inspecting the pipes.

“Well, eternity without a single cigarette is a long time!” Crowley says, throwing up his hands. Aziraphale employs sanctimonious silence against him, which is very effective if the result Aziraphale wanted was Crowley smoking several more cigarettes out of spite and then sharing another one with Anathema. By that point, Aziraphale has gotten off his high horse long enough to smoke half of one, and the sink is fixed.

“You just saved me a very expensive repair bill,” Anathema says. “Thank you so much.”

“It’s my pleasure, my dear,” Aziraphale says, not a hair out of place (although admittedly it’d be difficult to tell otherwise).

“Let me show you to your room,” Anathema says, and Crowley has enough time to register that she says room, singular, before she’s bustling down the short hall to a small guest bedroom.

The walls are robin egg blue, an old-fashioned radiator is next to the window, which is fogged up with heat, and the bed— _the one, singular, bed_ \-- takes up most of the nineteenth century wood flooring.

“Oh, there’s not—we’re not—” Aziraphale says, hands fluttering, before he reflexively falls back on good manners as he always does in times of stress. “What a lovely room! What lovely hospitality!”

Crowley is behind Anathema, outside of Aziraphale’s sight, so he very quietly has a panic attack in the hopes that it’ll be over by the time Anathema leaves the room.

“It’s my pleasure,” Anathema says, clapping her hands, which is the point when the smoke detector goes off. “ _Newt_ ,” she says very quietly, the tips of her fingers flexing. “I knew it was too quiet for too long,” she says and rushes downstairs.

“I’m so—” Aziraphale starts.

“I can—” Crowley says at the same time.

They stop.

“I’m so—” Crowley says, and Aziraphale says, “I can—” and then they both laugh awkwardly.

“I can sleep in the Bentley,” Crowley offers.

“That makes no sense,” Aziraphale says firmly, “seeing as I don’t sleep and you do and the bed is here.”

“I don’t have to sleep tonight,” Crowley says reasonably. “Let’s just stay up and play cards.”

“If you’re sure,” Aziraphale says doubtfully.

“I can sleep when we get back, it’s not a big deal,” Crowley says, rolling his eyes.

“Well, in that case,” Aziraphale says, smiling mischievously, “shall we get started on the festivities?”

“Didn’t you bring that wine for the party?” Crowley says, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“I brought _one_ bottle for the party,” Aziraphale says, lining the bottles on the short oak dresser. “The rest are for us.”

“An-Aziraphale,” Crowley says in delight; at this rate, Aziraphale’s going to think he’s developing a stutter. “Keeping the good stuff from the humans?”

“They—well, I think they’ll have enough, don’t you?” Aziraphale says, handing Crowley a glass.

“You just don’t think they’ll appreciate it the way you do,” Crowley says knowingly.

Aziraphale sniffs. “I am over six thousand years old, Crowley,” he says sternly. “I was there for the very first wine tasting--it was dreadful, and I shall never forgive it.”

“ _I’m_ also over six thousand years old, and I like boxed wine,” Crowley says, smirking, which quickly turns into a pout when Aziraphale ignores the bait in favor of laying out cards.

“As-Nas,” Crowley says in dismay.

“Loser drives the speed limit back to London,” Aziraphale says with such blandness that Crowley feels doubly offended.

“Loser—Loser—” Crowley starts, indignant, because he can’t think of anything he wants from Aziraphale other than the obvious and he can’t have that. Aziraphale’s eyebrow starts to make its way into his hair. “Loser makes cherries jubilee,” Crowley says, triumphant, and when Aziraphale starts to look smug, he adds, “from _scratch_.”

Aziraphale sighs. “Fine.”

Crowley would never actually admit it out loud to anyone, but he _loves_ cherries jubilee and Aziraphale makes it the best of anyone Crowley’s ever met ([10]).

Two bottles of wine later, Crowley not only has to drive the speed limit home, he has to do the following: make Aziraphale tea for a week (no miracles, Crowley served as a tea master for the Russian mafia in New York for two decades), drive the speed limit for the next two weeks, submit to actually dressing for the weather for the rest of winter, and read _The Pillowbook_ by Sei Shonagon with readiness for discussion in a week (joke’s on Aziraphale, Crowley has it in his storage unit and has read it literally a thousand times).

Anathema pokes her head in and says, “People are arriving, feel free to come down whenever.” She studies Crowley’s mournful face. “Everything okay?”

“He’s fine,” Aziraphale says, smiling angelically. “He’s just a sore loser.”

Crowley scoffs ([11]).

Anathema has wreathed the house in fairy lights and lit the fireplace; orchestral versions of Christmas music play from a speaker, which is propped up on the mantle. Crockpots full of apple cider and mulled wine are set up in the kitchen while chicken and dumpling soup simmers on the stove. Cornish hens stuffed with apples and sage and sourdough broule roast in the oven alongside buttered Brussel sprouts and rosemary potatoes. The fruitcake rests on the counter, filled with so much alcohol that the children can’t have any and it’s become an actual fire hazard.

Crowley drinks and watches Aziraphale: Aziraphale eating an entire Cornish hen by himself, Aziraphale talking to Shadwell and looking increasingly horrified, Aziraphale coming over to fill Crowley’s cup with more mulled wine because Crowley likes warm things better than cold things.

“I’m surprised you’re eating,” Aziraphale says, nodding to the empty soup bowl by Crowley’s elbow.

“I like soup,” Crowley says, smiling so soppily that sober Crowley probably would have punched him in the face.

“Ah, yes, I always forget that,” Aziraphale says, his tone warm and fond, and Crowley soaks it in like sunlight.

“You guys are so sweet,” Newt says, clearly drunk and hanging off Anathema’s shoulder like a baby monkey. “I wanna have what you have.”

Aziraphale blinks. “A hereditary enemy?”

Crowley is pretty smashed, but he still registers a tendril of dread pooling in his stomach.

“Noooooo,” Newt says, softly petting Anathema’s hair, “a love that spans mill—milllemleh—millien--”

“Millenia,” Anathema says, long-suffering.

Aziraphale laughs. “I’m afraid that’s not the case,” he says.

It’s the laugh that really makes Crowley feel small and stupid; he knows he was an idiot for ever having thought Aziraphale might love him back, but Aziraphale doesn’t have to rub it in.

“Not the—what?” Newt says, as if Aziraphale had told him the sky is green.

“We are friends,” Aziraphale says grandly. “Friends for—why, yes, for millenia.”

“Friends,” Anathema says, raising both eyebrows.

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale says, smiling at Crowley. “We’d—we could never be partners, at least not in the romantic sense.”

“Crowley, are you—” Anathema starts, frowning.

“I’m going to vomit,” Crowley manages before running upstairs and upending the contents of his stomach loudly into the toilet.

“Crowley, are you all right?” Aziraphale says from the doorway.

Crowley pants over the toilet, sweating, his eyes and nose watering. “I’m fine,” he says. “Must have been—uh, some bad chicken.”

“Can I get you anything?” Aziraphale says.

“No, no,” Crowley says, rinsing his mouth in the sink. Aziraphale hands him a tiny glass bottle of mouthwash. “You should go back down to the party.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to leave you if you’re feeling ill,” Aziraphale says.

“Aziraphale, you know I can just—get rid of it,” Crowley says, starting to feel nauseous again.

“Then why don’t you?” Aziraphale says, and Crowley looks up to see Aziraphale looking back with a sharpness that Crowley sometimes forgets he has.

Crowley looks down at the sink. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Crowley says, shoulders tensing near his ears. Crowley isn’t, in fact, sure that he could just get rid of it because it has more of an emotional origin than a physical one.

“Crowley, I—” Aziraphale starts, and Crowley can’t bear to hear it.

“I said I _don’t want_ to talk about it,” Crowley says through gritted teeth.

“Are you still in love with me then?” Aziraphale says, his voice as quiet as a mouse.

Crowley crosses his arms around himself and looks out the tiny window into the dark trees. “What kind of a stupid question is that?” he chokes out.

Aziraphale sighs heavily. “Crowley—”

“No,” Crowley says, trying not to blink because his stupid corporation’s eyes are filling up with tears. “How come whenever _you_ don’t want to talk about something, we don’t, but whenever I don’t want to talk about something—” his voice breaks, and he hunches even further into himself.

“That’s not true,” Aziraphale protests. “You were so bloody persistent about The Arrangement--”

“You’re the one who always gets to decide everything,” Crowley says, giving up and wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “You decide when we talk, when we see each other, _what_ we talk about—”

“You’re always testing limits, and you never know when to quit,” Aziraphale says, and it’d be better if he were angry, but he just sounds disappointed. “What do you expect me to do?”

“But there aren’t any rules anymore,” Crowley says, chest heaving, snot running down his face. “I don’t understand why we can’t—why we can’t—”

Aziraphale doesn’t say anything, like always, and Crowley feels such intense shame that he wonders how he doesn’t die from it.

Crowley wipes his face with toilet roll. “I’ll spend the night in the Bentley,” he says dully.

“No, no, you’re the one who actually needs a bed,” Aziraphale says immediately. “I can read in the living room, I’m sure Anathema won’t mind.”

“Fine,” Crowley says, starting to shiver, all the heat leaching out of him.

“Shall we—shall we go back down?” Aziraphale says.

“You go on,” Crowley says, his stomach once again trying to push into his throat. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“But Crowley—” Aziraphale starts.

“Pleasssse,” Crowley says, unable to stop himself hissing, wretched with misery.

“Yes, of course,” Aziraphale says, and thank g—thank the universe, he finally leaves.

Crowley washes his face, hands shaking, and wonders how long he has before Aziraphale comes looking for him. Crowley slips downstairs and out the backdoor, fumbling the knob, cringing when he shuts the door too hard.

He’s jiggling the door open to the Bentley when he realizes that it’s snowing—soft and slow and so quiet. It’s then that his body registers how cold it is, and it’s shocking after the oppressive stuffiness of being locked in a cramped bathroom with Aziraphale. He collapses inside the Bentley, boneless against the seat, cold sweat sticking his shirt to his back—the Bentley starts to play “The Show Must Go On” even though Crowley hasn’t turned the key in the ignition.

“Little on the nose there, isn’t it?” Crowley remarks.

It switches mid-chorus to “Thank God it’s Christmas” and Crowley groans. “Booo,” he says, taking off his sunglasses to put his arm over his face. The seat lowers until Crowley is flat on his back, and Crowley’s fairly sure The Bentley hadn’t come with that feature. He can hear the wind, the carolers in the distance, the creaking of branches as they’re weighted down with snow. He’ll just rest here a little while, Crowley thinks to himself—just until he doesn’t feel on the verge of puking. Crowley closes his eyes. Just for a minute. Surely no one could begrudge him a little rest—

#

“Crowley. Crowley! Open the door, you fool—oh, fu-fudgebuckets, how could you have let this happen? You _know_ you turn into a snake when you get too cold, what were you thinking? You stupid, stupid creature—all right, enough, stop honking at me, you infernal deathtrap, I’m trying to _help_ , open the door--come on now, there’s a good girl, thank you. Crowley, stop fighting me, it’s just a—it’s a sweater, you _need_ it, you idiot snake, I wasted a good miracle on making this snake-sized and you could at least show a _little_ appreciation—oh, really, going limp like a small child throwing a tantrum, that’s mature—yes, I know you’re upset with me, but you need—Crowley, you’ll discorporate if you let this go on, please— _please_ —I’m begging you, just let me hold you—oh, yes, thank Heavens, we’ll get you warmed up in a jiffy—”

#

Crowley wakes wrapped around Aziraphale, and he honestly can’t remember why he was so unhappy, he feels so warm and good and safe—and then he can and it’s like being dumped into the freezing ocean. Crowley scrambles away to the edge of the bed, Aziraphale blinking in surprise, saying, “Crowley, wait--!” and Crowley spills over the edge of the bed, arms wind milling, landing on the wooden floor with a thunk.

“—you’re going to fall off the bed,” Aziraphale finishes, sighing.

Crowley deeply considers crawling under the bed and staying there for the next century.

“Crowley, get up,” Aziraphale says, standing over him, interrupting Crowley’s slow creep under the bed. “There’s coffee and eggs on the dresser.” Crowley stares at him with wide eyes and even though Aziraphale can’t see his expression under the sunglasses, he seems to know anyway. “I told them you were feeling a little—under the weather.”

Crowley supposes that is technically true, and it’s only halfway to the dresser that he realizes Aziraphale has miracled him into the softest gray sweatpants that live at the back of Crowley’s drawers (Aziraphale would never have done it by hand, for a variety of reasons, but Crowley flushes anyway, his face hot in the cold room). Crowley gulps the coffee and then chokes because it’s boiling hot. “You trying to kill me?” Crowley wheezes.

“You need to be warm,” Aziraphale says, prim, and Crowley sneaks a peek at him to see that he’s sitting propped up against the pillows, ankles crossed, a very thick book in his lap, and a cup of tea in hand. Crowley’s chest hurts in the way that he imagines humans experience as homesickness.

A little pile of eggs are nestled in a small bowl with a chip in it, and he tests them with two fingers: two raw, three cooked. He swallows the two raw eggs whole and then takes his time peeling the others; it’s grossly satisfying, like peeling a sunburn or popping a blister.

“We’ve yet to do gifts,” Aziraphale says, smartly closing his book and swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

“Why not?” he says; the sweater Aziraphale gave him is too long in the sleeves, and he uses it to buffer his hands against the heat of the cup.

Aziraphale raises his eyebrows. “We were waiting for you,” he says mildly.

“Oh,” Crowley says, flushing again, and he turns toward the window. Snow blankets the ground, already covered in tracks from little birds and squirrels and children with sleds. “I suppose you got them all books.”

“If I’m remembering correctly, _we_ got them books,” Aziraphale says.

“I think your memory’s suspect, I wouldn’t be caught dead buying anyone books,” Crowley says, taking another intrepid sip of coffee.

He expects Aziraphale to laugh, but Aziraphale says, tightly, “Let’s not joke about that.”

Crowley spins around, frowning. “ _You_ don’t want _me_ —” he starts to say, indignant, because he wasn’t the bloody one who got discorporated the last go around--and then he shuts his mouth so fast his teeth click. He doesn’t really want to start this because who knows what else will come out—like insects in water pipes--and he already knows Aziraphale doesn’t want to hear it. Aziraphale has so kindly let him pretend that last night did not happen, and he wants to continue slinking to safety, like a dog with its tail between its legs. “All right,” Crowley says, when he trusts himself to speak. “I won’t.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says. “Shall we go downstairs?”

“You better have gotten me a present too,” Crowley informs him, moving the bottle of wine from the boot of the Bentley to wherever the other gifts are.

“Spoiled,” Aziraphale accuses.

Crowley snorts because they both know who the spoiled one actually is, and it ain’t him.

Aziraphale got them all books, of course: a computer manual for Newt, black market spell books for Anathema, a magic trick book for Brian, a book of at-home science experiments for Wensleydale, _Where the Red Fern Grows_ for Adam (Crowley fixes the ending while Adam is distracted destroying everyone at Monopoly), and for Pepper--a short, very old book that was the only record that told the truth about Lilith.

Crowley would know because he was the one who wrote it.

To his great shame, Crowley feels tears pool in his eyes. He hasn’t seen it in so long and the last time he had, he and Aziraphale had the biggest row over it. Crowley had wanted to shelve it in Aziraphale’s shop because it was the truth, because Lilith deserved it, because he wanted Aziraphale to honor her, and Aziraphale—had told Crowley he was a demon and therefore a liar and he would not have that book in his shop.

Crowley is speechless.

“That’s on loan, my dear girl,” Aziraphale tells her sternly. “It’s the only one of its kind and very precious.”

Sometimes Crowley thinks Aziraphale really missed his calling as a very stuffy librarian at Oxford University. Or a professor! He’d have those tweed patches on his elbows and start off on Queen Elizabeth II and end up somewhere on the history of the croissant and then—

“For you,” Aziraphale says to Crowley, handing over an envelope, and Crowley can hear the absence of the _my dear_ , which makes his shoulders rise up to his ears, like if he hunches over he can protect his heart better that way.

Crowley snatches the envelope and tears it open, ignoring Aziraphale’s sigh, and yanks out three folded sheets of paper inside. “You—you donated to Mosaic?”

“And the humane society,” Aziraphale says, smiling.

“You can’t—you can’t—” Crowley says helplessly.

“What’s Mosaic?” Pepper says, book held carefully on her lap, which is very atypical of her because she was a ruffian if Crowley ever saw one.

“It’s a homeless centre for LGBTQ+ youth,” Aziraphale says.

“Why’d you do that?”” Brian says with great suspicion. “Isn’t he a demon?”

“You see—” Aziraphale starts.

“Haven’t given my gift yet,” Crowley says, overly loud. “Look, lightsabers!”

The children look at the lightsabers gently humming on the carpet, then at each other, and then they simultaneously place their books aside.

“Really, Crowley, you can’t give them real lightsabers,” Aziraphale scolds. “They’re only children.”

“They won’t be able to actually hurt themselves,” Crowley says, leaning back in his chair. “They just sound cool.”

They hear the whomp of a branch falling to the ground and then a gleeful, “Sorry!” from outside, and Aziraphale covers his face with his hands. Crowley gives him his wine.

“Is this—this is from that priest’s house in—in—” Aziraphale says excitedly, sufficiently distracted from the mayhem occurring outside.

“—In Chieti, yeah, from 16—uh, 16, damn, can’t remember the year—”

“1642? 1635? 1622?”

“You can’t just keep saying years, A—Aizraphale, this isn’t a game show, neither of us are going to remember—”

“1646,” Aizraphale says, triumphant.

“You have no idea if that was the actual year, and you know it, you’re just trying to trick me,” Crowley says, rolling his eyes.

Aziraphale holds his tongue between his teeth as he carefully inspects the bottle with his hands for indented numbers because that particular priest had greatly enjoyed his wine, would probably be a famous wine maker in this century, and meticulously labeled every bottle with his name and the year with a small brand. “1689,” Aziraphale says finally, tapping the bottom of the bottle, looking superior.

“You weren’t even close,” Crowley says, smirking.

“I suppose I shall just enjoy this all by myself then,” Aziraphale says airily, wrapping his hand proprietarily around the bottle neck.

“Whatever you like,” Crowley says, genuine.

“But this is the last one!” Aziraphale protests, “I drank all mine ages ago—wait, this _is_ the last one, right? Because apparently you’ve been hoarding this all these years, and you—” he gasps. “You _lied_ to me, you told me you didn’t have any left!”

Crowley laughs. “I was saving it for a special occasion,” he says. “Look, stop fretting, I know it’s your favorite, I wouldn’t have drank it without you.”

Aziraphale looks mostly mollified, while Newt and Anathema look deeply embarrassed for them.

When they finally settle into the Bentley to head back, Crowley is grinning, relaxed, looking forward to an hour alone with the person he loves best, when Aziraphale says, “Look, Crowley, I—I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” Crowley says, puzzled, shifting the Bentley onto the little side roads that will lead them to the motorway.

“About _The Book of Lilith_ ,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley, completely unprepared for hearing that name, almost steers them into a tree. 

“You—you don’t owe me anything,” Crowley says, once his heart has removed itself from his stomach and returned to its normal geographical positioning.

“No, I really must. I deeply apologize, Crowley,” Aziraphale pronounces. “You were right. It belongs in my shop like the rest of the bibles.”

“Well. Great. Thanks,” Crowley says, feeling zero relief.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale says. “You heard what I just said, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I just thank you?” Crowley says, refusing to say that he doesn’t want to talk about it because then Aziraphale would just continue nagging at him, and Crowley might actually break this time.

“Well, you didn’t accept it,” Aziraphale says.

“I accept it, of course I accept it,” Crowley says, shoulders hunching up near his ears again. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

Aziraphale doesn’t say anything back, and Crowley doesn’t want to look at him, doesn’t want to see if Aziraphale thinks he’s a liar. Which. Of course he is, he’s a demon, isn’t he? Aziraphale had it right the first time, Lilith’s testament didn’t belong in the bookshop, and Crowley’s a liar. Aziraphale doesn’t need to apologize for anything at all, ever—an angel, asking for forgiveness from a demon? He wants to die just thinking about it. 

The rest of the drive is silent. Crowley feels childishly disappointed because he had wanted to continue laughing with Aziraphale, and now he doesn’t get to because he has too many feelings about Lilith and Aziraphale and Eve and he can’t talk about any of them.

“Thank you for driving,” Aziraphale says, a little stiff, when they arrive at the bookshop, as if Crowley is a stranger doing him a favor.

“Of course,” Crowley says, as if he doesn’t drive Aziraphale anywhere he wants to go.

“Have a good night,” Aziraphale says, stepping out of the car.

“I’ll—I’ll see you?” Crowley says, calling himself names for failing to make it a statement. That’s why he agrees to all those silly bets, isn’t it, because then Aziraphale has to see him in order for Crowley to keep his promises.

“Of course,” Aziraphale says, confused.

“R—right,” Crowley says, desperately longing to lock Aziraphale down into a specific plan because Aziraphale never initiates—and then who knows when Crowley will see him next. Crowley doesn’t want to be too much. In Crowley’s more despairing moments, he wonders if their relationship—such as it is—would even continue if Crowley didn’t keep bullying Aziraphale into seeing him.

“Toodle pip,” Aziraphale says.

“No one says that anymore,” Crowley says, but Aziraphale closes the doorway halfway through and hurries into the bookshop.

Crowley feels loneliness seep into his bones like cold winter air, but he’s used to it—the truth is, he always feels alone now when he’s with Aziraphale. It’s like the little match girl peering through the window at someone else’s fire glowing in their fireplace; at least, before, Crowley thought he’d had a chance of being allowed inside.

But Crowley’s always been a stupid fucking moron, so—well, he ruined it. But he still gets to be Aziraphale’s friend, doesn’t he? Aziraphale tells people they’re friends now, and that’s worth its weight in stars, and stars weigh a fuck-ton, he would know, he fucking designed them, held them in his limitless arms and whispered to them how much he loved them, how bright and beautiful they would be. Aziraphale was made to protect, to guard, but Crowley—Crowley had been made to create.

Crowley looks down at his hands, hands that once made stars; now they care for plants, pet small animals ([12]), hold small children, and most of all ache to touch Aziraphale—and he is reminded of poor Lavinia, whose hands were cut off entirely. Aziraphale had dragged him to the opening night of _Titus Andronicus_ , totally unaware of what it was about, only that it was a tragedy, and Crowley couldn’t even speak at the end of it. Aziraphale sat with Crowley as he drank himself into a stupor before forcing Crowley on an impromptu trip to some little pocket in central China ([13]) for the best rice porridge with salted duck eggs that Crowley had ever had. They had sat at a tiny table, which made it all the more conspicuous that Aziraphale was trying not to touch him--Aziraphale’s knees bent at awkward angles and he held his porridge in his lap—but all Crowley wanted to do with his entire being was reach out and rest his fingers on Aziraphale’s knee ([14]).

Crowley has been so foolish for so long.

He takes one last lingering look at the bookstore—unable to spot Aziraphale through the window—and slowly slides out into Soho traffic to head back to his lonely home.

#

After Armageddon’t, Crowley was electric with happiness, a livewire capable of powering the whole of London ([15]), and when he looked across the table at Aziraphale, he thought—oh, finally.

When they returned to the bookshop, Crowley couldn’t even wait until Aziraphale had popped the cork on the 1994 Mosel-Saar-Ruwer before he said, “Aziraphale—Aziraphale—”

“What, what?” Aziraphale said, tongue sticking out in concentration as he wedged the corkscrew into the cork.

“I’m—I’m in love with you,” Crowley said, exhilarated, and then he laughed with such purity and joy that everyone within a mile radius experienced a paroxysm of happiness without knowing why. “I’m in love with you!”

Aziraphale’s hands jerked and the whole bottle shattered on the countertop, wine flooding the floor and Aziraphale’s ninety-seven-year-old shoes ([16]). “Oh, bother,” Aziraphale said, looking down in dismay.

“Did you—did you hear me?” Crowley said, leaning forward on his elbows, not even caring that the wine was ruining his jacket.

“I heard you,” Aziraphale said, still looking at the floor.

“Well?” Crowley demanded, still grinning.

“That’s very kind of you,” Aziraphale said, painstakingly untying his Oxfords and taking them off.

“It’s not—it’s not kind,” Crowley said, rearing back. “It’s the truth! The truth I’ve been waiting to say for—for _centuries_ —"

“Well, now you’ve said it,” Aziraphale said briskly, snapping his fingers. The wine bottle reformed itself without the cork. “Shall we try this again?”

“What?” Crowley said, floundering. “But I already just—”

“The _wine_ , my dear fellow,” Aziraphale said, sliding over a glass.

“I—Aziraphale, are you—are you going to just ignore what I said?” Crowley said, and he could feel the adrenaline—the euphoria—receding, and panic setting in, all while Aziraphale just continued pouring the bloody wine without a word. “Aziraphale!”

“I wish you hadn’t said it,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley froze, shocked: he remembers being stabbed in the stomach, once, by a priest and how Crowley had marveled at only experiencing the sensation itself at first, like someone had applied a numbing agent before digging around in his body; of course, it was just the neurons in his stomach laboring to communicate the damage to his brain, the pain so heavy and immense that his body struggled to comprehend it. “I don’t understand,” he said helplessly.

Aziraphale breathed out sharply through his nose. “Crowley,” he said, warning, because he didn’t want Crowley to push him and Crowley always tried to respect that, he did, but this one time—surely an exception could be made, just this once.

“But--but you knew already, you’re an angel, that’s your schtick,” Crowley said. “I was only just—saying it out loud.”

“Demons don’t love,” Aziraphale said reflexively, his voice tight.

“Yes, they do,” Crowley cried, unable to keep from slamming his hand on the counter. “ _I’m_ a demon, and I—”

“Stop it, Crowley, just stop it,” Aziraphale said, raising his hands to his ears.

“No, I won’t,” Crowley said, his whole being throbbing with hurt and humiliation. “You’ve always got your head in the sand, and I _let_ you do it because it kept you safe, because you needed it. But what about me, Aziraphale?” Aziraphale remained silent, shaking his head. “What about me?”

“How can—how can an angel love a demon?” Aziraphale said, his mouth trembling.

Crowley went white, could feel all the blood draining rapidly from his face, his limbs shaky and shaking. “I thought—I thought you loved me,” Crowley said, in a small voice.

“I told you to stop, didn’t I?” Aziraphale said, eyes screwed shut. “You never know when to stop pushing for more, always asking questions you shouldn’t. Isn’t that how you—” he cut himself off, but they both knew what he had been about to say.

Crowley felt a growing awareness that his heart was in the process of breaking. “You know it’s cruel when you say stuff like that, don’t you?” Crowley said, almost conversational. He held on to the counter because if he didn’t, he was sure he’d fall down. He wanted to call Aziraphale selfish, cowardly, unangelic—the last one because it would hurt Aziraphale the most even though it was the least true. “Sometimes I thought to myself—we’re just playing the game and it’s okay because we both know the rules and neither of us mean any of it. But that’s all over now, everyone’s leaving us alone, so--what’s the excuse now?”

Aziraphale looks away.

“I thought—I thought you were ready to choose me,” Crowley said. “Me! How stupid was I?”

“I—I’m without a god now, aren’t?” Aziraphale said, voice hitching. “Isn’t that enough?” He shook his head like he didn’t know what else to do. “How can I expect you to understand?”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Crowley said, in a thin voice. “How could I not understand?” He ripped his sunglasses off. “ _Look_ at me, how—could—I—not?”

“It’s not the same,” Aziraphale said, openly weeping now.

“ _How_?”

“You chose,” Aziraphale says, pronouncing each word like separate sentences.

Crowley wanted to scream, but his lungs weren’t working; he made a small wounded sound. “I didn’t choose it, I didn’t, it _happened_ to me, it was forced.” He couldn’t get enough air. “I didn’t want it, I didn’t.”

“Crowley, please,” Aziraphale said, tears running down his face. “Can you please just—go.”

Crowley put on his sunglasses, hands shaking, equilibrium shattered; he wove like a drunken sailor to the door, feeling completely disoriented. He had done it, he had finally pushed Aziraphale past his limit, because he couldn’t fucking stop himself, because he was always too fucking much, because he was _unforgiveable_ —

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said.

“Yes?” Crowley said, almost panting, hunching over his stomach, unable to bear turning around.

“You’re—you’re my friend,” he said, his voice breaking on the last word. “Of course you are. My—my friend.”

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut, leaned his hot forehead against the cool door; his chest heaved, his body trying to weep, but he wasn’t going to let it. “Just—just give me a week, ang—Aziraphale.” He put his hand on the knob to give himself a little anchor. “I’ll be right as rain.”

Crowley left into the bright sunlight, and he wondered how it could still be the same day, how the sun could still be shining and people laughing and walking around as if the world had not been fundamentally changed. Oh God, he thought, what was he supposed to do now?

No one answered him. Of course.

#

Aziraphale doesn’t call Crowley after they return from Tadfield—typical--and Crowley would rather grind his teeth to dust than admit it, but he’s testing to see how long Aziraphale will go without contacting him. It’s an unkind—and worse than that, _uncool_ —impulse, and he feels the shame of it in his gut, intense and hot, like a boiling ocean.

After a long session of screaming at his plants that results in little to no catharsis, Crowley drives to _A Little Night Nosh_ in the pouring rain and viciously double parks. He stalks to the counter and sits on a tiny red led leather stool, elbows on the countertop, hands pulling at his hair. Zelda is meticulously making coffee, spending an extraordinary amount of time holding the measuring cup of beans up to the light, squinting at the measurement lines.

Crowley sighs as loudly as possible, which is difficult because Amelia is cheerfully barking orders in the back, and she used to be in the American military.

Zelda shakes the measuring cup, just a tiny bit, and goes, “Hm.”

“If you wore your glasses, you wouldn’t have this problem,” Crowley says, piqued, chin on the counter, splaying his arms out.

Zelda snorts. “I do not need glasses,” she says severely; her Viennese-German accent has survived all these years in England, making her sound like a particularly brutal Duchess. “Unlike someone else I could name.”

“I can hear you,” Amelia says ominously through the swinging kitchen door.

“If I _was s_ peaking about you—and it’s not clear that I was—then I would have implied that you were blind, not deaf,” Zelda retorts and then grinds the beans in order to have the last word. The glasses battle in the Rothschild-Martin household has been raging for seven years with no signs of a peace treaty any time soon; Crowley inflames it from time to time and writes—used to write—it down in his reports as sowing pride ([17]).

“Playing with fire, you are,” Crowley warns ([18]), cupping his hands around the hot cup of coffee Zelda puts in front of him.

Zelda raises her eyebrows, unimpressed. “I seem to recall that I am the one who told _you_ not to go overnight with him to Tadfield,” she counters, wiping the worktop.

Crowley groans ([19]).

“I told you it would end in tears,” Zelda says, ruthless, wiping Crowley’s hands when he doesn’t move them quick enough.

“Okay, fine, you were right, is that what you wanted to hear?” Crowley grumbles, holding his coffee with hands that now smell like lemon.

“What happened?” Amelia says, the clunking of her cane preceding her; she has enough metal in her leg that she claims she’s at least part cyborg.

“I was correct about the trip to Tadfield,” Zelda informs her.

Amelia rolls her eyes. “Obviously it was going to be a disaster, that’s a given, I want the _details_ , Mrs. I-have-to-be-right-about-everything-or-throw-a-fit.” ([20])

Crowley tells them, editing out the part where he turned into a snake and was forced into a snake-sized sweater, and then Zelda solicitously gives him more coffee, squints at the cup, and adds whipped cream.

“It’s not that bad,” Crowley says, scowling down at the coffee sundae.

“I’ll get the soup,” Amelia says kindly, patting his lemon-scented hand.

“Coffee doesn’t go with soup,” Crowley says petulantly.

“You’re biting off your nose to spite your face, ketzelah,” Zelda says because her kreplach soup has won at least five awards.

Crowley lowers his sunglasses two centimeters to properly glare at her because, yes, hello, _demon_ , and Zelda rolls her eyes in the most condescending way possible ([21]).

Amelia sets the soup—steaming hot, gold as butter and sunlight, kreplachs as big as fists—and Zelda waits until Crowley has an entire kreplach in his mouth to say, bluntly, “He’s not good enough for you.”

Crowley makes an incoherent noise of rage around the kreplach in response.

“Nice is not the same as good,” Zelda continues because she and Crowley have been intensely discussing _Into the Woods_ since he attended the premiere with Aziraphale and Aziraphale had left halfway through without a word.

“He’s an angel, good is the definition,” Crowley says stubbornly after he can finally swallow (the soup is too good to swallow whole, like a snake).

“From what you’ve told me, the definitions don’t matter anymore,” Zelda says, sniping his coffee and finishing it. “If they ever did.”

“Free will is for you lot,” Crowley tries.

Zelda snorts. “You can’t have it both ways,” she says. “You can’t argue that all the other angels are shit except for him and then turn around and say angels are made to be good.” She looks at him for a long moment, serious, eyes as dark as the center of a black-eyed susan, and he knows she’s sparing him from the other side of the argument: all demons are evil except when they’re not. Crowley hurts inside anyway.

He stares into his soup and thinks about Lilith, made from dirt the same as Adam, her only crime that she didn’t want to have to be obedient to someone else’s will.

“Eat, Anthony,” Zelda says, and Crowley can’t bear to look at the raw tenderness he knows is on her face, so he spoons more hot, comforting soup into his mouth.

“What’s this?” a polished British voice rings out from the front of the shop. “Anthony J. Crowley, are you cheating on me?”

“Every blessed day,” Crowley drawls.

“I thought _my_ soup was the only one for you,” Grace Chen—owner of the Michelin-starred _Beijing Roses_ down the street—says. She strides to the counter then sits down and leans over in order to better look in a judgmental way at his soup. “How dare you,” she observes and then steals a kreplach.

Considering this exchange happens at least once a week, the regulars don’t even look up ([22]).

“He’s actually cheating on me,” Zelda argues, conveniently forgetting she had been the one to put him up to it. “Frankly, _you_ are the other woman.”

“Is it cheating if he _left_ you for me?” Grace asks philosophically, sipping the coffee Amelia set in front of her.

Zelda gasps in outrage. “When did that happen?”

“Oh, the mid-eighties?” Grace says as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, raising her eyebrows at Crowley.

“Oh, that,” Zelda says, hand-waving. “He returned to me in the early two thousands.”

“I don’t know why the two of you just can’t admit you’ve been sharing custody of Anthony for decades,” Amelia says mildly. Grace and Zelda ignore her. “Anyway, Grace, have you heard yet about the weekend in Tadfield?”

Both Crowley and Grace look at Amelia in open-mouthed betrayal. 

“It’s because he came here first,” Zelda says smugly. “Because he’s cheating on you.”

Grace looks deeply conflicted as to whether to continue bickering with Zelda or to participate in Crowley’s deepening humiliation but before Crowley can tempt her into the sin of pride, she pulls herself together. “Enlighten me,” she says, which Amelia and Zelda do with technicolour commentary.

“He’s afraid,” Grace declares, leaning back and crossing her legs.

Crowley snorts. “How do you figure that?” he says, unable to help himself.

“When you’re finally out from under someone’s thumb, it’s not like flicking a light switch,” Grace says, gesturing with her half-empty coffee mug ([23]). “It takes time.”

“It’s not the amount of time I have an issue with,” Crowley says, huddling in on himself. “It’s about the fact that he _told me_ —”

“Yes, yes, we’re all well-aware of what he said,” Grace interrupts.

“Then stop making me say it!” Crowley says, flinging up his arms.

“Anthony, sweetheart, Grace may have a point,” Amelia says gently. “Why, it took Grace a year and a half after her husband died to start up with Zelda and me.”

“Well, even if he does change his mind, it doesn’t mean Anthony has to say yes,” Zelda says, leaning over the counter on her fists.

“I think that’s Anthony’s decision,” Amelia says, raising her eyebrows.

“Happiness is overrated anyway,” Grace adds. “It’s about what you can live with and what you can’t.” She steals Zelda’s coffee because hers is finished, and Zelda lets her.

“It might be easier living in hell at this point,” Crowley says.

“Oh, don’t say that, sheifele,” Zelda says. “We would miss you too much.”

“Who else would liven up the gossip pool,” Crowley says, deadpan.

Zelda whacks him on the back. “That’s the spirit,” she says. “Without you, there’s only Mr. Wosnyiscki down the street with his collections of 1930s international pornography.”

“It’s _very_ extensive,” Amelia says meaningfully.

“It’s probably all stuff I’ve already seen,” Crowley says, waving a hand.

“In other news, the plants you gave me are doing well,” Grace says, transparently changing the subject because Zelda and Amelia can academically discuss pornography for hours.

Crowley makes a face. “That’s cos they couldn’t hack it,” he says. “You’re too soft.”

“Isn’t that why you gave them to me?” Grace says in a tone so mild that Crowley can’t get as irritated as he wants to be.

“I did not _give_ them to you, they got _the boot_ because they _failed_ ,” he says, pointing at her. He always sent the failures to Grace because Aziraphale wouldn’t take them; he always looked at Crowley with suppressed pity when Crowley tried to hand one over and then made terrible excuses until Crowley finally took the plant back. “Sounds like you need me to come over to remind them.”

“You should come over but for other reasons,” Grace says, eyes lighting up like she had caught him in a trap. “My middle daughter is getting married, and I need help with seating charts.”

“Now we come to the real reason you came over,” Crowley says, eating a rugela to hide a smile.

“Constance is _engaged_?” Amelia gasps, hand over her heart.

Grace is smug. “I was the first person she called,” she says.

After that, they’re all off to the races about little Connie and how she used to cry about Grace beheading chickens in the kitchen and now she’s finishing veterinary school and _getting married._

Crowley remembers telling Connie about his time as a surgeon while her tiny hands chopped onions ([24]), and now she’s an adult who, last time she saw him, finally got up the nerve to ask him about his age. Crowley hated to think about it, but he couldn’t stop the inexorable passing of time forever; Zelda was ninety-one this year, and she looked mid sixties at worst. This was what always happened, in the end.

Humans aged and died, and he stayed the same.

#

Several days later, since Crowley still has not heard from Aziraphale (and has also fully exhausted the possibilities of causing chaos on the Tube), he decides to finally go on holiday. He had originally—and for exactly two thousand and nineteen years--planned on doing this with Aziraphale, but now Crowley’s plan is to never reveal the soft, bleeding parts of himself to Aziraphale ever again. So.

Six months after his failed love confession—six months spent feeling like he had been tossed into the sea with no idea which end was up--Crowley plans to journey to Jerusalem alone.

Centuries ago, when he arrived in what was to become London for the first time, he had walked the whole way because he was embarrassingly prone to sea sickness. Crowley would like to say he knew immediately that England would be the place he called home, but frankly, upon first glance he had actually declared, “This is a real pile of shit,” because shit of all varieties was literally everywhere and also he was still exceedingly bitter about the fall of the Roman empire (and thus of the practice of bathing). Crowley considers walking now, for old time’s sake, but then he remembers how lazy he is and also he has the better idea of driving the Bentley so she can see where he came from—Eden was gone, forever, and Israel was probably the closest anyone would ever get ([25]).

He drives through Belgium, which instantly reminds him of Aziraphale because of all the waffle kiosks and also all the chocolate. Well, partially the weed too, although Aziraphale hadn’t smoked since the seventies. He can’t resist getting some chocolate for Aziraphale for when he sees him next. Whenever that is. Crowley is sipping his own hot chocolate, more to comfort himself with the idea of Aziraphale than anything else. The hot chocolate is too sweet, too rich, too much, and it makes him want to cry, so he does. The Bentley won’t tell anyone.

When the sign for Germany’s border comes into view, Crowley vanishes his cold, unfinished hot chocolate. Crowley hadn’t actually been assigned to Germany at all during WWII; his last memories of Berlin are drinking coffee with Aziraphale in 1937 because they knew that in very short order, they would not be able to return for a long time. Aziraphale loved the look of Berlin but felt the food had nothing to say for itself, so they hadn’t been back very often since the war ended.

It’s as Crowley is trying to remember the name of the café they had visited in 1937 that he sees the sign for Austria’s border. “Haven’t been back to Austria in oh, sixty years,” he tells the Bentley, frowning. Crowley can’t remember why until he sees a sign for the Danube River and then he thinks: fuck, Mauthausen. Zelda had been one of the last he saved during the war and then he was seeing all those faces in his sleep, blood smears and pieces of brain and scalp on the dirt road, and he couldn’t do it anymore. It was one of the few times Aziraphale had really said, “Enough,” and meant it; he sent Crowley away to Switzerland because it was beautiful there and Crowley had no bad memories of it. Aziraphale sent him long letters every week. It’s still one of his favorite places.

As he drives through Austria, he feels a strong urge to get roaring drunk, he’s thinking about those faces again, and the roads and the guns and the children--Crowley thinks of trying to talk a soldier out of taking a three year old girl to the camps, smiling slyly at him, slouching, like Crowley was one of the them, one of the boys, and Crowley was in the middle of saying very casually, “What’s one kid,” when the soldier shot her in the head without even looking at her. It was so immediate that Crowley’s mouth had still been open on the last word of the sentence. The soldier said, into Crowley’s silence, just as casually, “How right you are.” Crowley doesn’t remember what happened after that, he just remembers slowly looking down to find his knees covered in her insides and feeling—feeling what?

He wants to ask Aziraphale about it, Aziraphale would know, he would have the words to articulate what exactly Crowley had been feeling when he looked down at his knees to see blood and brain matter.

In Hungary, he thinks about Aziraphale because Aziraphale had spent much of 1944 in the Budapest Ghetto and had spent long paragraphs describing all the lavish food he was eating, which Crowley knew was a lie engineered to make Crowley smile. In return, Crowley had gone out on scavenger hunts most days for little rich foods to miracle directly to Aziraphale. He knew Aziraphale would just give them away, but he imagined Aziraphale eating them anyway.

He feels quiet and blank through Serbia and Bulgaria; it’s like the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, where even Crowley can’t see anything, like he’s being swallowed whole—he thinks about arriving gleefully in the new world, only concerned with his self-assigned task to do something nefarious regarding coffee, stupidly expecting he’d have to sow a little discord (cow-stealing was an oldie but goodie) to satisfy Hell because he still hadn’t learned his fucking lesson about humans ([26]). What he saw was enough for him to decide to become a snake again, to fling himself into the sea and sink to the bottom, where it was silent and oppressive and the Kraken still slept on because it wasn’t actually the end of the world. Not yet.

On the car ferry to Istanbul, he deliberately looks down into the water, remembering what it was like at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean where no one had yet explored—clean and cold and aching with loneliness. Then he vomits because of the fucking sea sickness and a nice lady gives him a ginger candy.

Crowley resided in Turkey during the ninth and tenth centuries in order to foment the development of mathematics, in particular algebra, because he was a visionary and he foresaw the impending parental conflicts and crying adolescents ([27]). Aziraphale was there for the same reason—“To _enlighten_ ,” Aziraphale had said loftily when Crowley mentioned fomenting again because Aziraphale hadn’t seemed to get it the first time—and that is why Crowley remembers it as one of the best times of his life. For once, they were both on the same side: they ate together, they drank together, they sat in on lectures together. Aziraphale even stopped making condescending little remarks for at least seventy-five years. The first time a child cried because the math was too complicated, Crowley rubbed his hands together in glee—the future was now, suck a fat one, Hell--and Aziraphale only rolled his eyes instead of lecturing him. Aziraphale didn’t even say anything to embarrass him when he discovered Crowley helping the same child later.

When Crowley drives off from the ferry, he feels his body relaxing for the first time in weeks even though he hadn’t visited Istanbul in decades and nothing is familiar—it’s like his body is geographically keyed and retains its own somatic memory, down to the cells, of how happy he had been here. The Bentley purrs, and Crowley says, “Hey, hey, none of that now, you know what it does to your gears,” but he’s smiling ([28]).

They stop for coffee, and Crowley likes it so much he orders five more; the old man who owns the café looks deeply worried and brings them over like he’s holding a bomb.

“Caffeine, too much,” he says after Crowley’s third coffee.

“What? I’m great!” Crowley says, grinning maniacally, and shoots back the fourth one like a shot. The old man presses his hands over his face in despair.

When Crowley leaves, the old man shoves a box of baklava into his hands. “No, no,” Crowley says, trying to hand it back. “I don’t need this, I’m—” the old man crosses his arms to defend himself against the box ([29]).

Crowley looks at the old woman at the cash register, and she shrugs. “No English,” she says.

“I heard you speaking perfect English earlier,” he says pointedly.

She shrugs again and mouths, “No English.”

Crowley bangs down a wad of lira and yells, “I hate your coffee,” in Turkish as he leaves. He hears the old woman laugh as the door closes.

Crowley almost doesn’t eat the baklava out of spite but halfway into Syria, he decides he needs the pick-me-up after kilometres of periodic appalling hospital situations and children standing on the sides of the road. “This baklava is—amazing,” he says, offended and spraying crumbs everywhere. He pounds the steering wheel in impotent fury and resists the urge to send the other half of the baklava to Aziraphale, who would probably—no, Crowley is on a roadtrip, by himself, no Aziraphales or thoughts of Aziraphales allowed even if his stomach aches with the longing for said Aziraphale(s).

Syria is stark, all flat desert and then mountains in the distance, like the mirages of giants. At the beginning of the world, Crowley had prowled around outside Eden before going inside, marking the searing heat of the sand, the gray smokiness of the sky, the sun that was too bright to look at—the mountains far off and shrouded in clouds. If Eden is where the humans are supposed to stay forever, he had thought, then why is the rest of this here?

In the present time, Crowley still wonders about this as he crosses over into Lebanon, desert giving way to brief greenery—Eden itself had been like an interdimensional space pocket, with geographical limits on the outside and endless on the inside. Still, from the beginning, the earth outside of it—while desolate and barren—had been all queued up and ready to go, like the next streaming episode. Furthermore, this begs the question as to why the rest of the universe was created if humanity wasn’t supposed to eventually leave Earth to explore that too ([30]).

And _then_ , if the Earth held Eden like the universe holds the Earth—then, what’s outside the universe?

Crowley slumps back in his seat, puts his hands over his face and softly screams into them ([31]).

It’s not that Crowley wants to solve all the mysteries of the universe, but he _is_ tired of God maniacally playing them all like violins.

The Bentley finally passes the final border into Israel, and Crowley feels the nervous system of his corporation try to jump out of its skeletal prison. Israel is only two hours tip to tip—so small for being so hotly contested—and it’s not that it looks that much different from Lebanon or Syria but Crowley knows in his body, in the meat and the bones and blood of it, that this is the place where everything else began. Crowley enters the city of Jerusalem for the first time in approximately two thousand years and feels woefully underprepared.

The sun is setting on the cobblestone streets, warm golden light suffusing the buildings, limning the outlines of people crossing the street. More than any other city in the world, Crowley can feel the age of it, that people have been living here in an organized society for thousands of years, that this place has _history_.

It’s warm, even in January, and he remembers what it was to cross the desert for forty years, blistering heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. Crowley had more than once crawled into a burrow of desert foxes for warmth, and they were not afraid because they knew he was not actually a serpent and neither was he a human. Crowley does not know where Aziraphale was during that time, but he missed him then as he misses him now.

As Crowley drives to the outskirts of Jerusalem, toward the Judean Desert, he wonders what Aziraphale is doing, whether he is eating enough, whether his tea has gone cold or he’s gathered too much dust because he’s gotten too lost in reading without Crowley there to remind him to take a break every once in a while ([33]). Crowley knows that Aziraphale can take care of himself, that Crowley has not been able to be present to Aziraphale’s every want and need and that still, Aziraphale has gone on without him, but—Aziraphale has also always reminded Crowley of an old grandfather clock that winds down to stillness without someone to intervene.

On the other hand, Aziraphale would probably murder him if he knew exactly what Crowley was up to.

Crowley parks the Bentley in the sand, which the Bentley complains vociferously about, and Crowley says, “Look, you know concrete is never stable on sand,” and then when the Bentley continues honking at him, he says, “Hey, hey, now, that was uncalled for, the sand’s not going anywhere near your nether regions.”

The Bentley quiets with a small, apologetic beep, and Crowley sighs. “You can’t tell him about this either,” he says sternly. The Bentley makes an unhappy noise. “He’ll just worry for no reason, I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” The Bentley flashes its lights before settling down into the sand into what looked to be a very productive sulk. “Fine, suit yourself,” Crowley says, rolling his eyes, and strides off into the desert about five meters.

From there, he closes his eyes and sinks down into the earth, thousands of kilometers, until he reaches a tiny little grotto that no one has ever visited except for two people. It is pitch-black and airless and hot, and Crowley feels his nose prickle, his eyes sting with tears—the last time he had been here was right after Yeshua died. It’s just a few items Lilith had asked him to keep: an exquisitely carved snake (Crowley’s likeness, of course), a lock of Adam’s hair, and a meticulously constructed flower crown that Adam had made for Lilith. If Adam was alive today, he would have made a fantastic architect, Crowley muses as he puts all three things in his inter-dimensional space pocket.

And Lilith—well, she had always been the artist of the two of them. Her sculptures were gorgeous, raw, brilliant—the angels hated them. “Couldn’t you—put that elsewhere,” Michael had said, prim, nose wrinkled, and Lilith had blinked. The sculpture in question was the figure of a man with a huge, curved spine like a cat; he had no face and barely any neck, abstract, and then picking up detail through the shoulders and chest until every wrinkle and divot of bone could be seen in his long, fragile fingers.

“You don’t like it?” she said, curious, not sounding offended at all—but that was Lilith, all irrepressible interest and no sense of self-preservation.

“Of course I like it,” Michael said hurriedly, “it’s wonderful, forget I said anything.”

“No, really, I want to know,” Lilith said, stepping forward. “What bothers you about it?”

“It’s—sad,” Michael said finally, looking deeply uncomfortable.

“In what way?” Lilith said, tilting her head.

“I—I’m not sure,” Michael said.

Lilith tapped her index finger against her mouth. “I suppose I just thought—how can anything last forever,” she said, looking at the sculpture. “If there’s a beginning, shouldn’t there also be an end?”

“Are you questioning the plan of God?” Michael said, straightening, lips pressing together tightly.

“No, of course not,” Lilith said, startled. “I’m just—”

“Why don’t you make a nice little bird next time?” Michael said. “Not—whatever this is.”

Lilith had looked at Michael for a long time without saying anything, and Crowley, who had been watching from underneath a rock, willed her to not argue, to not ask questions, to just say yes. “If you would like a bird, of course I’ll make you one,” Lilith had said finally.

“Angels don’t desire,” Michael had sniffed and shortly after left for Heaven.

Crowley remembers scolding Lilith afterward, quite soundly, because didn’t she know the danger? Hadn’t he told her over and over again? Didn’t she _listen_? ([34]) Crowley pets the snake carving with the tip of his finger, its lively little face that he knows from touch alone, and he remembers how, in the end, Michael had destroyed all of Lilith’s lovely sculptures in front of her before cuffing her for her trial. All of her sculptures but one.

The little grotto had hidden these things for all these years, nestled closer to Hell than anyone would ever have suspected, including Aziraphale ([35]), who in the first thousand years of their acquaintanceship might have turned Crowley in for having this kind of contraband. Lilith had been destroyed, and after that, no one said her name again, not even Adam. Lilith had loved Adam with an intensity and depth of emotion that Adam wouldn’t experience until he had eaten the apple, and the whole thing had made Crowley so fucking sad. As a security measure for whatever glitch existed in Lilith—according to Upstairs, anyway—Eve was created from Adam’s rib instead of soil, trying to imbed obedience into the bone.

They must have really been kicking themselves after the apple business.

Crowley scrapes his knuckles one last time over the little cavity in the dirt where Lilith’s things had been safely kept for millennia before rising to the surface of the earth. He’s sweating, mostly from nerves, because this is the closest he’s been to Hell since the Apoca-that-wasn’t. Aziraphale would have been furious with him for coming here, but Crowley thinks he also would have understood why Crowley felt desperate to do it—to be able to hold Lilith’s things in the open without fear of repercussion, to not have to pretend he never knew her, is an indescribable freedom.

Crowley folds himself into the Bentley, completely drained. “Your turn to drive,” he tells the Bentley, and the Bentley gives a little beep before rolling off into the desert.

#

“The problem is,” Crowley says to the very nice bartender who had not yet cut him off, “the problem is—”

“The problem is what?” the bartender—Annie—says, leaning on her elbows on the bar.

Crowley looks down at his bottom shelf whiskey, which resembles cat piss. “This bar is shit,” he says sadly.

“You’re telling me,” she says, wiping the counter. Crowley moves his hands hurriedly in a pavlovian response. “I get free drinks, and I don’t even drink them.”

“You—you deserve better than this,” he says, pointing at her.

“Don’t worry, I’m studying to be a pilot,” she says.

“Oh.” He blinks. “That does make me feel better,” he admits. “Aziraphale was a pilot for a while, during the Great War, but he was shit at it.”

“Is this Aziraphale person the reason you’re drinking like this?” she says.

“No,” Crowley says, starting into his cat piss whiskey. Piskey? “Yes.”

“I see,” Annie says sagely.

“I am having an emotion, and I do not like it,” he tells her.

“I had an emotion once,” she says, understandingly.

“What’d you do?” he says.

“I dumped him,” she says, pouring him more piskey.

“We didn’t even get going enough for that,” he says, sinking his fingers into his hair and pulling. “I was—I was pre-dumped.”

“Unrequited love, eh?” she says.

“That’s the thing, I honestly really thought he loved me,” Crowley says, leaning forward. “I even thought about sending him a post card today.”

“What stopped you?” she says.

“I was a fool, truly—truly moronic for thinking if I—if I ran off, he’d follow me,” Crowley says. “Six thousand years,” he shouts, pounding the bar with his fist. “Six thousand years, I waited for that bastard, and he—he doesn’t have the decency to—”

Annie pours him another piskey. “Last one,” she says.

Crowley gasps, bringing a hand to his chest. “You’re cutting me off?”

“You’ve drank like twenty of these, and I honestly don’t know where you’re putting them,” she says.

“Bottoms-up, then,” he says gloomily, raising his glass.

“Wait, c’mon, I’ll do one with you,” she says and pours herself a glass too.

“You sure you wanna do that to yourself,” he says doubtfully.

“Solidarity,” she says, serious. “To the rat bastards that hurt us!”

“He’s really more of a lion bastard,” Crowley corrects, but he drinks up anyway.

“I’m gonna call you a cab,” she says, patting him on the shoulder. “Where are you staying?”

Crowley stares at her.

“What?”

“What country are we in again?” he says.

Annie stares back. “…France?”

“I’ve been speaking French this whole time?” he says, shocked.

“A version of it that makes me sad but yes,” she admits.

“You remind me a little of Eve,” he confides. “She always—” he swallows, feeling his throat go tight. “She always knew what to say.”

“She sounds like a good friend.”

“The best,” Crowley says, voice cracking.

Annie pours herself another drink. “For Eve,” she says and drains it.

“Thanks,” he says, wiping his nose with a sticky napkin. “She died of old age, at least,” he says. “934!” That was when God wasn’t arsed about the aging process. Crolwey sniffs. “Still hurts though.”

“Be careful, I think that’s two emotions now,” Annie says. “You might need a permit.”

Crowley laughs and later, when he’s staying at Annie’s friend’s hostel, he fills a bottle of MacCallan single malt with Annie’s name on it behind the bar.

Upon leaving Jerusalem, instead of returning immediately to London, Crowley had fucked off to eastern Europe in heels and an emerald green dress because he was tired of looking like the self that had spent so much time with Aziraphale. He sowed discord in Russia surrounding the possibility that he was a long-lost descendent of Anastasia Romanova and therefore an enemy of the state before that got boring ([36]), and he removed himself to Lithuania for potato dumpling soup ([37]) before vacillating in a western direction.

France had been a mistake, he reflects as he sits up in bed with a massive hangover the next morning. Reminds him too much of Aziraphale.

He had been—yes, he had been really stupid thinking Aziraphale would somehow know on some cosmic level that Crowley had ventured to France, one of Aziraphale’s favorite countries in the world ([38]), and therefore come find him and—what? Love him?

What a fucking idiot he was, he didn’t really know at this point whether Aziraphale even _meant_ the best friend label, considering everything else that had happened. Not that Aziraphale would lie, exactly, no, but—well, sometimes he _did_ indulge in certain white lies because he didn’t like hurting people. How humiliating if that was the case, and he should really—really, yes, go to Portugal and drink all of Aziraphale’s favorite wines and not share any of it--not even a tiny little bit--with him.

The Bentley protests because the Bentley is tired and wants to go home, refusing to move until Crowley says, “Okay, okay. Fine, last place, I promise.”

But Crowley mopes in many little wine bars and does not feel any better for his pin-point pettiness. In fact, he actually feels worse because his gut-instinct response to good wine is to turn to Aziraphale and have him try it, and it’s so automatic that he accidentally turns to a young man on a date—who then actually accepts--which results in the young lady dumping her very excellent wine on him. Crowley can’t even feel pleased with himself because there’s no one to scold him about the perils of evil, which by this point is probably unfortunately Crowley’s love language.

In any case, Crowley finishes his pilgrimage not with a bang but with a whimper as he walks in the door of his apartment and immediately pours himself onto the couch. He hasn’t gone to his storage unit yet, liking the physical closeness to Lilith’s things, and he feels like he’s eaten enough in the last three days for the next two months so that’s out. Today he’s wearing a gold metallic dress with murderous heels but it doesn’t feel like enough at this point—without consciously deciding to, he finds himself melting down into a ten year old form with little knee socks and crooked suspenders, like a naughty boy on leave from an exceptionally strict boarding school. He doesn’t often like to change his entire form in case he gets stuck that way, but he’s feeling a severe existential case of the fuck-its that he hasn’t experienced in six thousand years so: whatever, etc. ([39])

Crowley whips his plants back into shape through radiating severe disappointment—that’s how the plants know they’ve really done it, he doesn’t even shout—before heading back out on the town to cause half-hearted mischief. He spends an hour misplacing other people’s oyster cards through the fine art of pick-pocketing, knocks over a cart of cabbages at the market, and is in the middle of perpetuating some truly horrendous graffiti when a cop catches him in the act.

“Drop the can,” the cop says, grabbing Crowley by the upper arm with a heavy hand. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Crowley glowers at him; it’s not as effective because he’s currently about half a meter shorter than usual. “Fucking pig cop,” he adds to compensate.

“I knew little snots like you when I was in school,” the cop says, smirking. “No mumsy to get you out of trouble now, eh?”

“You’re going to lock up a ten-year-old boy?” Crowley says, disbelieving.

“Who said anything about locking you up?” the cop says, raising his eyebrows. “Sounds like you’re projecting.”

“Big word for a pig brain,” Crowley says, mutinous.

The cop rolls his eyes. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Your interrogation technique is terrible,” Crowley says.

“Maybe I really will have to lock you up,” the cop observes.

“You’ll never get a word out of me,” Crowley says stoutly. “Not even my serial number.”

“Well, last chance then before I take you in,” the cop says. “Parents’ mobile number?”

“Never surrender, never give in!” Crowley shouts and then makes such a racket that everyone on the street starts to stare.

The cop rubs his other hand over his face. “Just tell me who you belong to,” he begs.

Suddenly Aziraphale appears beside them, panting, hands on his knees. “Me,” he says, trying to catch his breath. “He belongs to me.”

Crowley stares at him. The last time he saw Aziraphale run was probably three hundred years ago when he was literally being chased with a pitchfork.

“Oh, thank god,” the cop says, shoving Crowley toward Aziraphale.

“You didn’t even check to see if I know him,” Crowley says, indignant. “He could be a kidnapper!”

“Anthony J. Crowley,” Aziraphale says, dabbing his face delicately with a handkerchief. “Stop trying to get me in trouble.”

“Hey, I know you,” the cop says, frowning. “You refused to sell a book to my sister because she had a speck of motor oil on her hands.”

Aziraphale draws himself up to his full height, which is definitively taller than Crowley at the moment. “How could anyone who asks for a book with _motor oil_ on their hands ever be capable of properly taking care of said book?” he says, fire in his eyes. Crowley squints. Yes, actual fire. “In addition—”

“Never mind,” the cop says, backing away. “I see where he gets it from.”

Crowley is opening his mouth to say that he is, in fact, _older_ than Aziraphale, thank you very much, but Aziraphale is already grabbing him by the upper arm and carting him away.

“Hey, hey, hands off the merchandise,” Crowley says but can’t follow through with any sort of threat because Aziraphale is much, much stronger than him at the best of times. What is it with adults and manhandling children anyway?

“Crowley, I have been looking for you _everywhere,_ where have you been?” Aziraphale says, easily pushing Crowley down onto a bench.

“Alpha Centauri,” Crowley says, trying very hard to project an aura of wounded dignity.

Aziraphale looks at him with such a biting skepticism that Crowley almost cowers into the bench. “Where have you really been?”

“Jerusalem,” Crowley mumbles.

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale says, face softening. “To retrieve Lilith’s possessions.”

Crowley gapes. “How did you know?”

Aziraphale snorts. “Crowley, I _know_ you, you always forget that.”

“Maybe if you showed it more often,” Crowley retorts before biting the inside of his cheek, hard, because he definitely hadn’t wanted to say that.

Aziraphale deflates into the bench and sighs. After a very long moment, in which the sun dips down a degree in the sky, he says, “Yes, you may have a point.”

Crowley stares at him. “How much did it hurt to say that?” he says.

“I think it severely wounded my liver,” Aziraphale admits, and Crowley is startled into laughter. No one can make him laugh like Aziraphale; it’s the primness and righteousness cut with the driest of humor, a little secret self-awareness for flavouring.

“That’s not good, you need that,” Crowley says, half-smiling. “All that fancy wine—”

“Come back with me,” Aziraphale says, abrupt, and then coughs. “To the bookshop.”

Crowley blinks. “I gathered,” he says.

“Please,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley tries out a smirk. “Catch me if you—” he starts to say, standing to run, but Aziraphale grasps his shoulder, whip-fast.

“Caught you,” Aziraphale says, excessively smug.

Crowley makes a moue of displeasure.

“Oh, come now, don’t pout,” Aziraphale says, also standing. “It’s unbecoming.”

“I’m a demon, I don’t _become_ ,” Crowley says, reflexive, and then looks up at Aziraphale (now _that_ feels unusual), unsure.

“Well,” Aziraphale says, smiling a tiny crooked smile. “Perhaps you do now. If you want.”

Crowley doesn’t reply, but Aziraphale still tucks Crowley’s hand into the crook of his elbow and leads him to the bookshop, taking him home.

#

“Let’s do the—yes, the unlabeled one,” Aziraphale decides, taking it down from the shelf. Neither of them know what’s inside it, but Sophie Bisset made it just for Aziraphale back in 1902 and they’d drink anything she made.

Crowley has folded himself onto the sofa like one of Aziraphale’s French girls and is highly perturbed by the fact that his feet aren’t even close to the arm.

“Crowley, change back, please, I can’t drink with you like this in good conscience,” Aziraphale says, settling into his chair.

“I’m not actually a child,” Crowley points out, sitting up.

Aziraphale sighs irritably. “Humor me,” he says.

It takes him a minute, but Crowley remembers how to be in an adult body again: all the related additional capacity for emotional control (like, a teaspoon of it, but still), the long legs, the attendant leather jacket.

“How about that wine?” Crowley drawls, and Aziraphale beams.

They drink so much that Crowley doesn’t even remember where he is in the morning until he flicks the air with his tongue and smells Aziraphale—and soup? Crowley levers himself upright before wandering into the kitchen to see Aziraphale standing at the counter, shirtsleeves rolled up, chopping vegetables with strong hands and vulnerable forearms.

Crowley tries not to immediately explode because the last time he saw Aziraphale’s forearms was fifteen years ago when he was patching Nanny up after a bad fall in stiletto heels on gravel. “Ngk,” he says.

Aziraphale rolls his eyes. “Coffee is on the table,” he says and shoos Crowley away like he’s a particularly bad goose.

Crowley slinks to the table and sprawls into the chair. “Why’re you makin’ soup anyway,” he mumbles into his coffee.

“Well.” Aziraphale fidgets. “It’s for you.”

“F’r me,” Crowley says, puzzled. “I haven’t won any bets lately.”

Aziraphale sighs. “Not everything is about losing a bet.”

“You never give me stuff for free,” Crowley argues. “Remember that big garnet necklace? And those chickens that Leo kept? And the teeny turtles that washed up—”

“Yes, yes, all right,” Aziraphale says and then so pointedly doesn’t say, “holy water” that Crowley is forced to hear it anyway. Aziraphale hates talking about it, so, as always, Crowley follows his lead. “Now, that’ll cook for a bit and then we can have duck soup for breakfast.”

“Ah!” Crowley cries. “You distracted me, you dastardly angel. Why am I getting soup?”

Aziraphale huffs. “Can’t I do a nice thing for a friend?”

“I suppose,” Crowley says slowly, feeling his heart sink. Here it is, Aziraphale talking around important things again, and Crowley really just needs to learn to finally accept that that this was all he-- ([40])

“It’s an apology,” Aziraphale bursts out.

“A…pology soup?” Crowley says.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, and then, “but also no.” He looks at Crowley in an intensely meaningful way as if Crowley will magically understand if only Aziraphale concentrates hard enough.

“You’re gonna…have to say more,” Crowley says, finally.

Aziraphale looks like a guest on one of those American game shows, where there’s three doors to choose from, and he would very much like to call a friend. “Crowley,” he says.

“Yes?” Crowley says.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says again.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Crowley says, tart.

“You’re not making this easy,” Aziraphale mutters, which--Crowley doesn’t even know how he gets those words out of his mouth, considering how bloody difficult Aziraphale has made Crowley’s life at times.

“Well, it would help if I knew what this was about,” Crowley points out.

“You _know_ what this is about,” Aziraphale says, looking at him from underneath very blonde eyelashes.

“I can assure you that I do not,” Crowley says and then sips at an extra espresso that he did not have before in order to remain strong and not apologize for himself.

Aziraphale looks at him balefully. “You really don’t, do you,” he says and then bites his lip, folds into himself, suddenly looking terribly small and ashamed. “The apocalypse, Crowley.”

“You’re…sorry for the apocalypse,” Crowley sounds out.

“No, you idiot, I’m sorry about what I said!” Aziraphale says, rubbing his hands over his face.

“That’s not a very nice apology,” Crowley observes.

Instead of laughing or glaring like Crowley had intended, Aziraphale frowns deeply, the muscles in his face spasming, like he had been jabbed in the ribs. “You’re right,” Aziraphale says, taking a deep breath. “You deserve a real apology.” He lets the breath out. “Crowley, I am so sorry for saying those things about you and our friendship. My behavior was inexcusable. None of it—none of it was true. You have been the best friend in the world to me, and I was, as the colonies’ say, a real heel.”

“So was I,” Crowley points out. “You don’t need to apologize for that.”

“Yes, because I provoked you,” Aziraphale says, looking down at the table.

“That doesn’t mean I get to lose my shit just because you did,” Crowley says patiently. “I should be sorry too.”

“No, no, you can’t let me out of this like you always do,” Aziraphale says, shaking his head. “Not this time. The point is that—I knew I could hurt you.” He clears his throat. “More than you could hurt me. Because I—I knew how you felt, Crowley, and I didn’t care in those moments because I was so—goddamned afraid.”

“You swore,” Crowley says blankly because he can’t think of anything else to say. He’s burning up with humiliation because Crowley had known Aziraphale knew how he felt for all those centuries, but he didn’t _know_ until just now because they had never talked about it until Crowley opened up his godforsaken mouth immediately after the Apoca-nope.

“Crowley, that is the least interesting part of what I just said,” Aziraphale says, but Crowley feels dizzy, and he can’t speak—he wonders if this is God’s punishment for Eve eating the apple, that his stupid snake tongue freezes up at all the important moments. “It was unconscionable. I was a complete and total coward. And I would—I would like to make it up to you.”

Crowley is shaking his head. “I don’t understand the point of this apology,” he says. “You’re sorry because you—what? Don’t feel the same about me? Because you were afraid and ran away?”

Aziraphale swallows. “I have been—I have been so wrong about you,” he says very quietly. “Everything I said about you and being a demon—I believed it at first, of course, but then I _knew_ you. Even though there were parts of me that still had to believe demons were evil, there were other parts of me that knew the truth, knew that you were—"

“No, don’t say it, please, angel,” Crowley says, shrinking back into his seat, “I can’t bear it—”

“—that you were g _ood_ ,” Aziraphale says fiercely, “and that the system is wrong and that _I_ was wrong and I am so sorry, Crowley, you’ll never know how sorry I am.” He leans forward and says, careful, “I know that it contributed—”

“ _No_ , I can’t talk about that,” Crowley says, hands shaking so much he has to put the espresso cup down on the table.

There is a long moment where Crowley feels his face burn from how intensely Aziraphale is looking at him.

“All right,” Aziraphale says finally, leaning back and sliding his hands into his lap. “All right, we won’t.” He sips tea that wasn’t there before.

“I knew you were afraid,” Crowley says eventually. “I knew that’s why you said all that.”

“A cowardly angel, who would have thought,” Aziraphale says, wry.

Crowley slants him a look over the top of his re-filled espresso cup, and Aziraphale chuckles. “Well, w _e_ know how the sausage is made, so to speak,” Aziraphale says. “The humans don’t.”

“A surprising amount of them can guess,” Crowley says because he has been on all corners of the internet, for better or for worse.

“Still,” Aziraphale says. “Even if you think you know, you don’t _really_ know until someone tells you.”

A charcuterie board appears between one of Crowley’s slow blinks and the next: curling ribbons of prosciutto, small white balls of burrata cheese, a tiny glass pot of red onion jelly, a wheel of camembert, smoked gouda. Miniature loaves of bread full of rosemary and poppy seeds and sea salt.

“I thought we were having soup,” Crowley says, already reaching to slice a loaf of bread. The little knife has an angel wing on the handle. Crowley likes burrata cheese because it looks like chicken eggs, and he smoked gouda because it tastes like cheesy bacon.

“What’s a meal without a first course?” Aziraphale says, looking offended. Crowley has seen him sort prison rations into courses. Ah, Egypt, 277 B.C.

“You’re right, how silly of me,” Crowley says, quirking a smile. Aziraphale beams at him with such warmth that Crowley feels he can finally exhale fully, that he can let go of some of the clawing anxiety from the past week. As a result, Crowley eats more than he means to so when Aziraphale serves him a very large portion of soup, he eyes it with trepidation.

“You don’t have to finish it, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, setting a cloth white napkin in his lap. “I’ll eat it.”

“But you worked so hard on it,” Crowley says.

“It’s about how much you like it, not how much you eat,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley dips his soup spoon into the golden broth to taste it. “Grace taught you how to make this,” Crowley says, betrayed.

“But do you like it?” Aziraphale says, leaning his cheek on his hand.

“How’d you get her to teach you when she refuses to teach me?” Crowley says while shoving an entire soft boiled duck egg into his mouth.

Aziraphale laughs. “Don’t be jealous,” he says. “She just wants you to be taken care of.”

“I can take care of myself,” Crowley grumbles and then slurps a sheaf of hand-made noodles loudly.

“I know you can,” Aziraphale says, matter-of-fact. “But why should you have to?”

Crowley looks at him, deeply suspicious.

“Just eat your soup,” Aziraphale says, indulgent. “I’m glad you like it.”

“I don’t like it,” Crowley says, reflexive.

But he finishes the whole thing ([41]).

#

Crowley slouches into the _Beijing Roses_ for his weekly soup run, only to find Grace, Zelda, and Amelia playing poker at a table by the window in broad daylight. The table is packed with food and cards and poker chips: eggplant in garlic sauce, soup dumplings, pastrami sandwiches stacked so high that they’re in danger of falling over, blocks of cheese kugel, delicately steamed bok choy, blueberry hamantaschen, dan dan noodles, half a roasted duck. “What are you playing for?” Crowley asks because they never play for money.

“Coupons,” Amelia says because Grace and Zelda are staring intensely at each other like two cats who are about to fight. Crowley picks up a random coupon: “Amelia dresses up like brainwashed Captain Kirk and takes Zelda as Spock as her slave, only for Grace as Uhura to rescue both of them, and then Spock!Zelda shows them her utmost gratitude.”

“This is…very specific,” Crowley says, setting it down, and spotting another one in Grace’s handwriting that says, “Grace gets first choice of fish at the market.”

Zelda gives an elegant shrug. “Surprisingly, it’s Amelia that’s the one holding out.”

“I just don’t know if I can get Captain Kirk’s character right,” Amelia says, biting her lip.

“I cast according to our strengths,” Zelda lectures, shoving two stacks of chips into the pot.

“You cast according to your base desires,” Grace corrects.

Zelda makes a delicate “pfft” noise, and Amelia scribbles on a new blank coupon: “one-time use immediate argument ender between Grace and Zelda.”

Crowley would feel bad for Amelia, but he’s seen her play Grace and Zelda off each other like a master violinist for both fun and profit.

Crowley sighs. “Grace, I can’t believe you taught Aziraphale to make the soup when you’ve been refusing to teach _me_ to make it for twenty years.”

“Well, he needed all the help he could get,” Grace says, pragmatic

“For what?” Crowley says, perplexed.

Grace looks up and arches an eyebrow. “For wooing you,” she says, and returns to her cards.

“Woo—what? First of all, I don’t need to be—to be _wooed_ , what century are you even from,” Crowley says loudly. “Secondly, I’m a—” and then he remembers he probably technically isn’t a demon anymore, but still, “—thirdly, Aziraphale wouldn’t be _wooing_ me in the first place. Considering.” Crowley clears his throat and decides that is explanation enough.

Amelia looks at him pityingly. “Shall I deal you in?” she says. “We can place a bet.”

Crowley snorts. “I’d win that bet in a heartbeat.”

“Then put your money where your mouth is,” Grace invites because she’s been watching too many American action films with Amelia.

Crowley considers. “What do I get when I win?” he says.

“ _If_ you win,” Amelia says, prim, “you can give us that Michelin star.”

Crowley starts to grin in delight but quickly changes it into a smirk ([42]).

“But when you lose,” Zelda continues, “you let all of us introduce you as our grandson.”

Crowley blinks, slow, like a snake. “You already do that,” he points out.

“But you don’t get to whinge about it,” Zelda says, shaking her finger at him.

“You don’t even like Aziraphale,” Crowley says, sprawling into a chair.

Zelda sighs. “I don’t like his wishy-washy-ness, there’s a differenc _e_.” ([43])

“That’s how you felt about me for a long time,” Grace says, taking a scallion pancake from a new plate that had suddenly appeared without Crowley noticing.

“Well, and then you stopped being wishy-washy,” Zelda says, matter-of-fact.

“Do you think things would have happened differently if I hadn’t told you how I felt _before_ my husband died?” Grace muses.

“It still took you a year and a half to fully commit,” Zelda says, sticking her nose in the air.

“And then Grace spent two full years wooing us,” Amelia reminds her.

“Enough with the woo,” Crowley orders, examining his hand of cards. Bit not good, really.

“Now you’re being a brat,” Grace says, piling food onto a plate that Amelia has handed to her.

“I am always a brat,” Crowley says smugly.

“Not always,” Zelda interjects.

“Takes one to know one,” Grace says, smirking, handing Crowley the plate.

“He gets it from my side of the family,” Zelda says, proud.

Amelia peers at Crowley’s hand of cards. “Oh dear, you really got shit cards, didn’t you.”

Crowley doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but he does fold his hand after that ([44]).

#

When Crowley next goes to visit Aziraphale, Aziraphale shoos him away because he has just received some misprinted bible from 1536 that Aziraphale—in his own words—stupidly gave away several centuries ago because there were so many copies of it at that time that it was worth next to nothing. 

Crowley sulks around London for several days, once again playing the game of when Aziraphale will contact him next. Before, Crowley would drop in whenever he could because chances to see Aziraphale had been thin on the ground for a century or two—but now that he can see Aziraphale whenever he wants, he still can’t because he worries about—neediness, being too much, whatever. He feels like he is twisting himself into painstaking knots to suit Aziraphale, and he doesn’t know how to stop.

“Aren’t I over six thousand years old?” he asks the statue of Queen Victoria. “Shouldn’t I be better at this?” Queen Victoria says nothing. On the whole, she had been one of Aziraphale’s, although somewhat self-absorbed, and Crowley hadn’t been interested enough to meet her. Crowley had always liked the clever ones, the ones who tested boundaries and felt too much, who were interesting because they were _interested_. “Eh, what do you know, you hardly left England.”

It’s on the fourth day of sulking, when Crowley has developed a vested interest in _The Good Place,_ that Aziraphale calls him. “Good morning,” Aziraphale says.

“Good…morning?” Crowley repeats and yes, it is seven in the morning.

“I was hoping you would join me for breakfast,” Aziraphale says when Crowley doesn’t say anything else.

Crowley frowns at his laptop screen. He needs to know if Chidi ever loves Eleanor back. “Where?” he says finally.

“Crowley, are you all right?” Aziraphale says.

“Of course I am, why wouldn’t I be,” Crowley says, checking how many episodes are left.

“You’re not watching _March of the Penguins_ again, are you,” Aziraphale says suspiciously.

“It’s a stupid movie about penguins, why would I be watching that,” Crowley says, lifting his nose in the air even though Aziraphale can’t see him.

Aziraphale ignores him. “Because no matter how many times you watch it, it’s not going to change the fact that some of the baby penguins die—"

“Their parents don’t even try to save them!” Crowley yells.

“—and then you spend a week brooding about it, periodically asking me why the baby penguins had to die, and I have _no answers left_.”

“I’m not watching it,” Crowley says sulkily.

“You’re watching something that’s upsetting you, I can tell,” Aziraphale says.

“I am doing no such thing,” Crowley says, shutting his laptop with a click. “Breakfast, Aziraphale, where?”

“Oh, the new little tea place a few streets over from yours,” Aziraphale says, suddenly agreeable now that he’s got his way.

“What’s the occasion?” Crowley says, rolling out of bed to go fuss at his hair in the mirror.

“Does there need to be one?” Aziraphale asks, sounding genuinely curious.

“Oh, uh, it’s just unusual,” Crowley says, freezing with his hand in his hair because he doesn’t want to get into a conversation with Aziraphale about how he hasn’t directly initiated an outing together in decades.

“To--eat together?” Aziraphale says, sounding deeply skeptical.

“Kshhh, kshh, I think you’re breaking up, see you soon, kshhh, kshhh,” Crowley says.

“Crowley, what on earth—”

“Kshhhhhh,” Crowley says and hangs up. He stares at himself in the mirror, says, “eh,” and takes a shot of bottom-shelf vodka for luck.

By the time Crowley arrives, Aziraphale has already conquered a small table by the window with a proper English breakfast, a pot of tea, and a variety of pastries.

“There you are,” Aziraphale says, unimpressed.

“Here I am,” Crowley says, cheerful. Aziraphale’s unimpressed voice is his love language, probably. His other love language, anyway. Crowley takes a sip of the coffee that’s on his side of the table: black, bitter, almost undrinkable. This place knows how to do it right. Crowley spares a moment to think about Berat Tekin and his offensively perfect coffee. Aziraphale piles bits of food onto a plate and slides it over to Crowley.

Crowley picks at the pastry samples, nibbles at the sausage, eats one (1) mushroom. “Finally finished with that bible, eh?” Crowley says into the silence. It’s raining outside. Crowley finds himself soothed against his will.

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale says. “It wasn’t that interesting in the end, actually. But I received a fascinating electronic mail from Pepper.”

“For the last time, it’s an e _-mail_ , Aziraphale, come on, you’re doing this on purpose, I know it,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale blinks at him like butter wouldn’t melt. Crowley heaves a sigh and steals the last of the tea in revenge.

Aziraphale takes a folded piece of paper from one of his inside pockets and hands it to Crowley. “Take a look,” he says.

Crowley stares at him. “You _printed_ her e-mail?” he says. “What are you doing with that smart phone I got you, using it as a paperweight?”

Aziraphale huffs. “Just read it,” he says and then takes an especially large bite so Crowley can’t continue to interrogate him. Crowley bares his teeth at him and then unfolds the paper to read it.

_dear mr. aziraphale_

_finished the book you gave me, so much cooler than any of the stuff they talk about at church. i just don’t understand why lilith was punished tho, i think she should’ve been able to ask all the questions she wants, although i guess adam couldn’t either? i wonder if anyone even talked about her after she was gone. anyway god sounds like a real controlling jerk._

_do you have anything else about lilith?_

_thanks,_

_pepper_

Crowley feels as though someone punched the air out of him. It’s funny how he doesn’t actually need to breathe at all but still finds himself experiencing these little human idiosyncrasies like sadness and shock and hurt. “What’d you say to her?”

Aziraphale opens his mouth.

“If you say the word ineffable, I’m going to absolutely lose it.”

Aziraphale closes his mouth.

Crowley squeezes his eyes shut and scrunches his nose. “Really,” he says.

“Well, I didn’t know her,” Aziraphale says defensively.

“You read her whole gospel, and you had nothing else to say about her?” Crowley says, frowning fiercely.

“Pepper wouldn’t have had the context for any of it,” Aziraphale says, making a face. “The thing is, Lilith actually reminds me quite a bit of you.”

Crowley scoffs. “Yeah, ‘s what got her into trouble, isn’t it.”

“You didn’t cause her punishment, Crowley,” Aziraphale says gently.

“I didn’t stop it either,” Crowley says tightly.

“Tell me about her,” Aziraphale says, neatly sidestepping the topic of Crowley’s Fall ([45]).

“You—you want to know?” Crowley stutters. Centuries upon centuries of bitter arguments about Lilith until they stopped talking about her entirely because Crowley couldn’t stand Aziraphale condemning her anymore.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says calmly. “I do.”

“Well, uh, okay,” Crowley says and chews the inside of his cheek. He doesn’t even know where to start, how to talk about her, because the answer to Pepper’s question is that no one had talked about her afterward. Crowley had been completely alone in his grief. He doesn’t know how to stop.

Crowley reaches into his inter-dimensional space pocket and pulls out the little carved snake, presenting it to Aziraphale.

Aziraphale’s eyes light up. “Oh, how lovely,” he says and then peers closer and laughs. “It’s you! Even down to that little glimmer of mischief.”

“She knew how to do that,” Crowley says. “Make it look alive. Specific.”

“She must have been highly perceptive,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley considers. “It was more than that,” he says slowly. “It was…an exceptionally tuned empathy.”

“I remember,” Aziraphale says suddenly. “At the court proceedings.”

“What?” Crowley prompts when Aziraphale doesn’t continue.

“You don’t know?” Aziraphale says, blinking.

“I didn’t go,” Crowley says with a tone of finality.

“Ah,” Aziraphale says, nodding, biting his lip in thought. “Well, she hardly spoke throughout. Not that it mattered, it was all a formality anyway. But at the end, she said: I know the reason you’re doing this is that you’re terrified, even if you can’t admit it to yourselves. And yet—why can I not forgive you?”

“And then what?” Crowley says, swallowing, a metallic taste in his mouth.

“That was it,” Aziraphale says. “No one answered her, and she didn’t say anything else.”

“Ah, fuck,” Crowley says feelingly. “She was just a child, really. Her and Adam both.”

“She was an adult,” Aziraphale says, frowning at him. “Old enough to make her own choices.”

Crowley barks out a laugh. “What choices?” he says. “I hadn’t given them choices yet.”

“And yet, she still found a way,” Aziraphale says, wry.

Crowley starts to smile, a real smile that he immediately tries to smother. “That’s nice, actually,” he says. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”

“I always wanted to ask you,” Aziraphale says. “How did you—what did you think about Eve?”

Crowley’s not surprised that Aziraphale is asking because to think about Lilith is to think about Eve. “I stayed away from the garden, after that,” Crowley says, smoothing his fingers over his lips. “For a while, anyway. You know the rest of _that_ story.”

Aziraphale raises an eyebrow. “Crowley, I know you spent time with her afterward. I saw you.”

“You’re going to take all my secrets,” Crowley complains. “Demons gotta have mystique, you know. An intrigue.”

Aziraphale chuckles. “You needn’t worry. I’m sure you’ll always have at least one or two secrets squirreled away to surprise me with.”

Crowley considers Eve as Aziraphale polishes off his plate (and Crowley’s) and two more pots of tea. “Cain and Abel were trouble from the start,” Crowley says eventually. “Set up to fail. God’s doing, of course. She was still really involved in those days, always whispering in someone’s ear.”

“You make Her sound like Lucifer Morningstar,” Aziraphale observes ([46]).

“Hah,” Crowley says, stealing Aziraphale’s tea cup. “Where do you think he got it from?”

Aziraphale frowns.

“Oh, don’t give me that, you know it’s true,” Crowley argues. “Anyway, Eve wasn’t happy about any of it. She could see Cain getting colder and more bitter as he got older. She tried to counteract it, but—” Crowley shrugs.

“Well, she was his mother, wasn’t she?” Aziraphale says. “If anyone would have been able to help the poor boy, it would have been her.” Aziraphale leans back in his chair, laces his fingers together on the table. “Perhaps Cain was—was born to be what he was. The first murderer.”

Crowley is surprised by the amount of rage that rears up inside of him but then again, he had changed Cain’s nappies, cooked for him, played with him—he had worried endlessly about him and God and what it all meant.

“Picture this, Aziraphale: God Herself—creator of the universe--shuns him, not just once, but over and over again. From the time he’s learning to walk and offers Her a flower to when he’s a farmer and sacrificing his harvest.” Crowley’s hands squeeze the tea cup, knuckles turning white. “God holds the greatest moral weight in the universe, more than Eve, more than Adam, more than anyone. What would you expect to happen?”

“I—I never thought about it that way,” Aziraphale says, biting his lip. “But perhaps it was a test.”

“Of course it was a fucking test,” Crowley says, flinging out one hand. “She wanted to see what would happen if you give one person everything and the other person nothing. Wouldn’t it take a really special person to continue giving relentlessly even when they received nothing in return?” Crowley leans forward. “ _Wouldn’t_ it?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Aziraphale says, leaning away. “But—”

“Well, nobody works that way,” Crowley says, forcing himself to lean back and set the cup on the table so he doesn’t break it.

“Job,” Aziraphale suggests.

Crowley snorts. “You didn’t see him later. He was a fucking wreck for the rest of his life.”

Aziraphale looks at him for a long moment with serious blue eyes. “I’m never there for the aftermath, am I,” he says.

Crowley looks away. “Eve grieved her sons until the day she died,” he says. “She was smart. Practical. She knew she couldn’t win against God.”

“What did she do?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley shakes his head and laughs. “She started growing apples. The best apples in the land. And every year, she sacrificed every single one of them to God.”

“I heard about that!” Aziraphale says. “Gabriel _hated_ it because he had to spend so much time cataloguing each one.”

“Good, the fucking wanker,” Crowley sniffs.

“I wish I could have met her under better circumstances,” Aziraphale muses.

“Well, the other thing Eve did was have me transcribe her version of events,” Crowley says. “She wanted it disseminated, and I kept telling her I was the wrong person for the job but she said she didn’t trust anyone else. So.”

“You have a g _ospel w_ ritten by _Eve_ and you never told me?” Aziraphale says, looking like he’s about to implode from academic fury.

“Well, it wasn’t really a gospel,” Crowley says, chewing on a nail. “It was the events themselves annotated with her thoughts and feelings. Random poems, some pressed flowers. I guess it was more the earliest version of a pillowbook than anything else.”

Aziraphale stares at him with the yearning a dog aims toward a beloved ball stuck in a tree.

“Fine, fine, you can look at it,” Crowley says, waving a hand.

Aziraphale lights up like a Christmas tree. “Oh, _thank_ you, Crowley, that means so much, you have no—”

“Shhh, before I change my mind,” Crowley says grumpily.

Aziraphale mimes zipping his lips shut and throwing away the key.

“Stop that,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale shrugs. “Mmf mmf, mm,” he says.

“Aziraphale!”

“Mmm mff mmmf mm—”

“Okay, fine, you can talk!” Crowley says, laughing helplessly.

“I appreciate your permission to speak,” Aziraphale says so politely that Crowley knows he’s fucking with him.

“You’re welcome,” Crowley says. “I don’t hand out that privilege lightly.”

Aziraphale rolls his eyes. “And Adam? How’d he feel about the whole thing?”

“I honestly think something was missing in him to begin with,” Crowley says, contemplative. “It was like, after eating the apple, he just expected everything to be taken away from him anyway so why bother.”

Aziraphale winces. “They don’t put that in the Bible.”

“I mean, he still lived his life,” Crowley says. “He just wasn’t—surprised by bad things happening.” ([47])

“They’d probably call that trauma nowadays,” Aziraphale says, looking sad.

They sit in silence until their waitress appears to lay the bill on the table. “Whenever you’re ready,” she says brightly.

“Thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale says, smiling at her.

Crowley sinks into his seat, crossing his arms, because since the apology soup, he had thought everything was back to normal between them, ill-advised love confession carefully shoved aside to never be revisited again. But Aziraphale is still literally calling everyone else “dear” except for him, and it makes Crowley feel like the miserable, rejected ten-year-old he was a week ago.

“Well, that was certainly scrumptious,” Aziraphale says cheerfully when they’re standing on the street. “Time for me to head back to the shop!”

“We’re not—we’re not going to the park?” Crowley says, blindsided, because they always go to the park after they eat.

“No?” Aziraphale says. “Were we supposed to?”

It had never been something they _said_ , just something they automatically did, like topping off each other’s drinks and avoiding walking by the little flat a street over from the bookshop because they were both fairly sure it was haunted. If Aziraphale was deliberately being obtuse, it was the perfect plan because Crowley can’t _possibly_ bring it up and look like—like—well, like a right knob. “No,” Crowley says weakly.

“Very good then,” Aziraphale says. “T.T.F.N--that is ta-ta for now.” And he walks on down the street. Whistling.

Crowley can’t even bring himself to heckle Aziraphale for quoting a cartoon tiger ([48]).

“Those old ladies don’t know shit,” Crowley mutters to himself, shoving his hands into his pockets

He goes to the park anyway, by himself, and picks fights with the ducks until they decide even frozen peas aren’t worth the aggravation.

#

Aziraphale hasn’t contacted him at all since that breakfast, and all of Crowley’s calls have gone to voicemail. Crowley feels terrible, like a glutton for punishment. He used to get commendations for that sort of thing, but now his misery means nothing to anyone but him.

“When will I learn,” he mumbles to his coffee machine, which makes a comforting steam-releasing sound.

He goes and stands before the line of his plants for their daily dressing-down. They’re trembling in fear and part of him likes it and part of him doesn’t. He crosses his arms, cocks out his right hip, and says, “Oh, fuck it, do whatever you want, I give up,” and decides that getting absolutely smashed on tequila on the floor of his kitchen is his current best option.

Three hours later, he’s calling Aziraphale and slurring into his answering machine. “Hey, hey, what are you doing right now, we ought to go see a film and eat popcorn, well, you can eat popcorn, I’m gonna throw it at people, and then, and then, we can go get a cheeseburger, you like cheeseburgers, they’re not as good as in the states but what can you do, _I_ wanted to live in South Africa, always warm there, but you decided to settle down here in this rainy godforsaken island so then of course that’s where we ended up but couldn’t we at least _vacation_ somewhere else? Oh, I know, let’s get a summer home! And then—” the answering machine beeps, cutting Crowley off.

Crowley looks indignantly at his phone. “The fucking nerve,” he says and he calls back and calls back and calls back until he ultimately passes out on the tile.

Crowley spends a week self-immolating with shame, in which Aziraphale notably still doesn’t call. It’s then that Crowley decides to go visit All Hallows-by-the-Tower for the first time in decades because it’s where he feels closest to the Mary Magdalene.

“Oh, Mary,” he sighs. “What would you think of me now.”

He asks, but he already knows she’d think he’s a right idiot. She’d been frustrated with the apostles, their male entitlement, their stuffiness, their boring idealization—she thought Yeshua was a great man, yes, but only a man—and she liked to “keep them on their toes” by hiding frogs in their bedding and throwing pebbles into their tents. When they complained, she would just point to the sky and say she didn’t know why God was doing such an authentic reenactment of Passover this year but far be it from her, such a lowly woman, to understand the machinations of God, etc, etc. They would then counter with the fact that it was winter, and Mary would stare at them with such sweet incomprehension that they had to give up or look like fools.

Yeshua wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but everyone knew he loved Mary best and most, which probably explained the later tone of the gospels. Mary took no shit and no prisoners, so she would probably be giving Crowley a swift kick in the arse right about now and ordering him to stop fucking around.

“No man is worth it,” she had lectured the other women one night in their tent during one of their many council meetings.

“But Yeshua—” Yohannah protested.

Mary silenced her with a look. “Even he’s a person,” she said. “With flaws and bad habits and little mundane idiocies. Why, I saw him walk into a tree the other day, too busy looking at Judah’s posterior.”

The women tittered.

“I thought Judah was going to scratch your eyes out for the privilege of serving Yeshua at dinner the other night,” Deborah says slyly.

Before Mary could respond with something cutting and start a row, Shoshana interjected, “Shall we move on to the other—actually pertinent--notes of interest?” and they got back on track, but it had only served to intensify Crowley’s feeling of foreboding about the entire situation.

“The truth was,” Mary said to Crowley once when she was very, very drunk after Yeshua’s death, “we were two halves of the same person. That’s why Judah was so angry—he had Yeshua’s heart and body, but I had his soul.” Mary shrugged. “And now neither of us has any part of him.” Mary had laughed then, loud, bitter. “Are you happy now, Judah? Are you happy now?”

Crowley wanted them to all be in Heaven together, having worked out the internal mechanisms of their relationships like they hadn’t in life, but Crowley knew Judah was in Hell, never to have the chance to repent, to do better than he had before.

“It’s really Aziraphale that’s the problem,” he tells her, long legs thrown over the pew in front of him, and he can almost hear her saying, “And _you_ have to stop letting him get away with this inexplicable hot-and-cold nonsense.”

“Bah,” he says to the altar, but Mary would know that was the sound of capitulation.

Crowley slides directly from the pew into his storage unit, rummaging around in the very back of it for Eve’s book. He had less fragile copies, of course, but he wants Aziraphale to see the original, to touch it with his hands.

Crowley has made sure it remains unchanging: dark yellow papyrus, thinly inked Aramaic in Crowley’s spidery handwriting, the scent of flowers and apples, a heavy ink stain on fifty of the pages because Crowley and Eve had drunk too much and laughed too hard.

He tucks it into his inter-dimensional space pocket with Lilith’s things and saunters to the bookshop, head down against the cold wind. The bell rings, and the bookshop turns warm and gently lit, welcoming Crowley. Aziraphale looks up, smiling, familiar, dear. “Oh, good timing, I was just about to call you,” he says.

“Were you really,” Crowley says and before Aziraphale can answer, he places Eve’s book on the countertop.

Aziraphale looks at it like he has discovered the Ark of the Covenant, hands hovering hesitantly over the pages. “I can’t believe it,” he says, darting a glance up at Crowley and then back down. “Are—are any of your own thoughts in here?”

“Nah,” Crowley says, a little surprised at the question. “Not much for navel-gazing, me.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale says and then brightens. “I’m so glad Heaven never got their hands on this.”

“They didn’t know to look for it,” Crowley says, rolling up on his toes.

“Is that why you never told me about it?” Aziraphale says, deflating.

“Partially,” Crowley admits.

Aziraphale sighs. “Well, I hate to admit it, but that was a fair assessment.”

“It’s more complicated than that, and you know it,” Crowley says, eyebrows drawing together.

“Do I,” Aziraphale says, a little bitter smile crossing his face, but before Crowley can say anything, he says, “You can just leave it here, I’ll most likely take a while with it. I don’t want to make you wait.”

“I thought—we could discuss it while you read it?” Crowley says. “Like a liveblog or something.”

“You know how I get, Crowley, I’ll forget you’re here at all. We can discuss it afterward,” Aziraphale says.

“You’ll actually call me to let me know you’ve finished,” Crowley says doubtfully.

“Of course I will, I’ll have to return it to you, won’t I,” Aziraphale says, a little impatiently.

“Oh, like you called me back when I called a week ago,” Crowley says, fighting through severe embarrassment to call Aziraphale on his shit.

Aziraphale’s neck flushes. “You were clearly inebriated,” he says stiffly. “What would have been the point?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Crowley says. “To let me know you’re listening? That you’re there?”

“Crowley, I don’t think we should talk about this,” Aziraphale says quietly. “It never goes well.”

Crowley draws himself up to his full height, trying not to quail. “I’m tired of this,” Crowley says, just as quiet. “I thought after the soup apology, we’d be done with this, but you’re still—you’re still holding all the cards and not letting me see any of them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aziraphale says valiantly.

“You can’t keep inviting me places and then ignoring me and then popping up again whenever it’s convenient for you,” Crowley says.

“Then maybe I shan’t call you at all,” Aziraphale snipes, heading off into the shelves.

“Stop deflecting,” Crowley says, following him. “We can—I’ll do anything you want, we can pretend I never told you—” Crowley falters “—what I told you, and we can just do move on, yeah?”

Aziraphale takes books off the shelf, seemingly at random. “That’s what _you_ want,” he says.

“Then what do _you_ want,” Crowley says, trying not to raise his voice.

“I want this conversation to be over,” Aziraphale says, his tone cool, dismissive.

“Aziraphale—angel—what am I doing wrong?” Crowley says. “Tell me how to fix it.” He looks at the hard line of Aziraphale’s back. “You—you never call me ‘dear’ anymore.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Aziraphale says repressively. “Dear. My dear. There. Are you happy now?”

“No,” Crowley says, feeling like he’s been slapped, tears filling his eyes.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Aziraphale says, sounding remote. “I don’t really have anything else to say.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, voice cracking.

Aziraphale says nothing, stacking books on little side tables like Crowley isn’t even there.

Crowley can’t fucking believe himself, that he’s once again pouring his heart out against a stone wall, and he tries not to cry, but he can’t help it, it’s all so familiar and devastating. Aziraphale still says nothing, doesn’t face him, doesn’t even falter in his pace.

“With you, when it’s like this, it’s always like—it’s like talking to God, after I—after the—and She didn’t say—say anything, not a word, not a sound, and I have never—never—” and his legs give out on him, useless buggers like they’ve always been, and he curls into himself, arms around his knees, and sobs.

“Oh Crowley,” Aziraphale says, anguished, and then there are strong arms around him, tucking him into Aziraphale’s lap. “My dear, my darling,” he says and Crowley can feel Aziraphale’s tears in his hair, on his forehead.

“—never felt so alone, I can’t take it—” Crowley says into Aziraphale’s shoulder, and Aziraphale rocks him like a child, shushing him.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Aziraphale murmurs. “I didn’t realize—I didn’t realize.”

Crowley cries and cries, feeling like he’s been wrenched open and all of his insides are exposed, his body an epicenter of hurt. Aziraphale’s hands smooth over his back, his hair, one of them settling to cup the back of his neck. “I don’t understand,” he says, crying harder, because that was the first thing he had said when he finally dragged himself out of the boiling sulfurous pit. “I don’t understand.”

Crowley remembers when he first heard the Humpty Dumpty nursey rhyme and how much he hated it, how he had so perfectly encapsulated it—but Aziraphale is holding him so tightly that for the first time, he feels comforted, like he doesn’t have to try so hard to put himself back together because Aziraphale will help him.

Aziraphale holds him until he runs out of tears, drained, wrung out like a drying-up cloth. “I don’t think your shirt is going to survive this,” Crowley says, apologetic.

Aziraphale chuckles, his voice raspy. “Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.”

“Hah,” Crowley says. “That’s modern, for you.”

“I try,” Aziraphale says and then starts to ease Crowley away. Crowley panics, wrapping his arms around Aziraphale’s neck, and Aziraphale says, “Shh, it’s okay, my dear, I just wanted to look at your face for this next bit, but I don’t have to.”

“What next bit?” Crowley says, frightened.

Aziraphale sighs. “Where I explain myself.”

“Oh,” Crowley says and tightens his arms. “No, you can say it like this.”

Aziraphale is silent for such a long while that Crowley almost falls asleep, breathing in bergamot and wool and whatever after-shave Aziraphale has been using for the last fifty years. “Do you remember 1816?”

“That’s a very specific year, how could I remember—oh,” Crowley says, as the penny drops.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says heavily. “Oh.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Crowley says, puzzled.

“It was—it was the first time I really realized the danger of what we were doing,” Aziraphale says. “Before that, it was abstract. Sure, we had to be careful, but only in between dinners and shows and letters, of course.” Aziraphale hides his face in the space between Crowley’s neck and ear. “But then you were gone. I couldn’t find you. I thought maybe—maybe he’s in the states ahead of the gold rush, although punctuality isn’t really like him but—and then I thought, well, what about Thailand, he’s probably having a good laugh at my expense with a nice fruit drink, that’d be just like him, but you weren’t there either. I was down to desperately inspecting my book shelves for snakes when I had to face the truth.”

“I’m sorry, angel,” Crowley says, gripping his shoulder tightly. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, how could you?” Aziraphale bursts out. “I didn’t tell you.”

No, Aziraphale hadn’t said a word when Crowley showed up at the bookshop in 1836, ragged, bloody, shell-shocked, after twenty years of torture in Hell. Aziraphale had only taken him up into the apartment, washed him, clothed him, and tucked him into Aziraphale’s little-used bed. Aziraphale had sutured the worst of the wounds closed, bandaged him, and fed Crowley water with an eye dropper.

Crowley had been depleted in every way, unable to even sit up by himself, let alone wave a hand to heal his wounds—he had to do everything the manual way, the human way, and it had been deeply frightening. Aziraphale had grimly, tirelessly, helped Crowley eat, go to the washroom, change his bandages, sat next to his bed every night while he slept. Crowley had nightmares constantly and every time, Aziraphale would remind him where he was, that he was safe, that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt Crowley.

Beezlebub had got word that someone had gotten a little too comfortable on Earth, hadn’t tried to off an angel when they had the chance, so all the demons stationed on Earth had been recalled for torture. The thing was, the identified culprit didn’t even turn out to be Crowley—that poor sod, Amon, got the holy water treatment after not taking a shot at Gabriel when he had the chance.

“You can tell me now,” Crowley says, finally leaning back to look at Aziraphale’s face, which is all blotchy and red from crying.

Aziraphale looks agonized. “It’s hard,” he says. “It’s hard to tell you how afraid I was, how afraid I still am. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen to you again. I was so stupid, Crowley. So careless. I didn’t know the seriousness of what could happen.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Crowley says. “It didn’t even have anything to do with us, we were just caught in the crossfire.”

“What was the difference, Crowley?” Aziraphale says, miserable. “You still got hurt.”

“That didn’t seem to bother you so much during the No-pocalypse,” Crowley says bluntly.

“Turns out it’s far easier to be brave when you’ve got nothing to lose,” Aziraphale says, half-smiling. “It’s the every-day courage that’s more difficult. When I have everything I want, and I’m too blasted afraid to take it.”

Crowley looks at him for a long moment, and Aziraphale doesn’t look away. “What is it that you want?” he says.

Aziraphale’s mouth works, like the words are stuck in his throat, but Crowley doesn’t help him. “You,” he says finally. “All I’ve ever wanted is you.”

“Then what the fuck, angel?” Crowley says, exasperated. “I gave you me on a silver platter, and you rejected it.”

Aziraphale cringes. “I know, darling, I know,” he says. Aziraphale gently tucks Crowley’s hair behind his ear, and it almost undoes him. “I’ve always been slow to change, end of the world impulsiveness aside, and the—the freedom frightened me. Now all the external obstacles were out of the way, and for the first time, it was just us. And I—I didn’t know how to act, what was safe. I didn’t want to risk losing you through our own foolishness.”

“You almost lost me anyway,” Crowley points out.

“Grace said the same thing,” Aziraphale says, rueful. “So I tried and then I’d second-guess and then I’d try again and—you get the picture.”

“You can’t keep trying to deal with it by yourself,” Crowley says, serious. “You’ve got to let me in.”

“I know,” Aziraphale says, grave. “I will. I’ll—I’ll try.” Crowley doesn’t know whether he should trust it, it sounds so hesitant. He’s on the knife-edge of disappointment and hope when Aziraphale clears his throat and shifts his weight uneasily. Crowley feels the familiar dropping sensation of disappointment winning out, but then tells himself that he got more than he could ever have imagined, and it was enough for today. They had the rest of eternity to work things out.

Crowley starts the process of untangling himself to stand up, but Aziraphale yanks him back down into his lap. “What—” Crowley starts to say.

“No, I have to say this,” Aziraphale says and takes a deep breath. “Crowley, I love you. To be clear, I’m in love with you. You are—you are everything to me, and I should have told you that six months ago. I should have been brave enough, but I wasn’t.” He gives a wobbly smile. “I’m just going to have to make it up to you for the rest of our lives, won’t I?”

Crowley gapes ([49]).

Aziraphale laughs wetly. “Crowley, you have to know, it was absolutely the worst moment of my very long life when I realized you were gone, and I had no idea when you were coming back. _If_ you were coming back. I was convinced they’d given you holy water and it was all my fault by the time you showed up at the bookshop half-dead.”

“Oh, angel,” Crowley says, full of sorrow, because he knows exactly what that’s like.

“I didn’t know it then, but I already loved you,” Aziraphale says, rubbing his thumb over Crowley’s cheek. “As I love you now.”

“Consistency has never been your problem,” Crowley agrees.

“Thoughtlessness, on the other hand, has been a particular specialty of mine,” Aziraphale says, wry. “Can you forgive me?”

“An angel needing forgiveness?” Crowley snorts at the absurdity.

“Crowley, is that really the belief you want to keep with you?” Aziraphale says gently.

“It’s just—that’s not the way it works,” Crowley mutters. “Demons are damned, and angels do the forgiving. That’s how it goes.”

“Not anymore, my dear,” Aziraphale says. “We’re equals.”

“Well, of course I forgive you,” Crowley says uncomfortably and then almost compulsively, “there’s nothing to forgive.”

Azirpahale looks at him with a deep sadness that he’s never shown Crowley before. “You wouldn’t let me say this before, but I hope you’ll let me say it now.” He waits, and Crowley doesn’t protest. “I know through my own cowardice I’ve—inadvertently reinforced how you’ve felt about yourself since the Fall. When I said you didn’t understand, it was really me who didn’t understand. How could I?”

It’s at this point that Crowley realizes suddenly that not only has he not been wearing his sunglasses this whole time, he actually left them at home. He fights the urge to cover his face with his hands.

“I didn’t want to jinx it by mentioning it but—you haven’t Fallen,” Crowley says and then feels a spike of fear. “Have you?”

“No, I haven’t,” Aziraphale confirms. “As to that--my working theory is faith. You lost your faith in God.”

“And you haven’t?” Crowley says, incredulous ([50])

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” Aziraphale says, grinning. “But the world is still here, and I have you, and no one is in charge of us anymore. I’m not looking a gift-horse in the mouth.”

“You’re something else, angel,” Crowley says, laughing foolishly.

Aziraphale looks at Crowley with unbearable tenderness and Crowley only has a split second to realize that Aziraphle is leaning down to kiss(!) him on his laughing mouth and then Crowley isn’t laughing anymore. Aziraphale’s mouth is warm and soft—the safest thing Crowley has ever known. Crowley melts into him, and Aziraphale lifts him effortlessly as he stands, knees cracking from sitting so long, to carry him over to the sofa.

“Oof,” Aziraphale says and Crowley giggles, though he’d deny it vehemently if ever called on it. “Does this mean I finally get to eat at the famous _A Little Night Nosh_?”

“Ah, fuck,” Crowley groans. “They’re going to be insufferable.”

“I’m sure they have a right to be, as your grandmothers,” Aziraphale says, as if butter wouldn’t melt.

“Not you too,” Crowley complains.

“I can’t argue with the facts,” Aziraphale says fondly. “Or Grace Chen.”

“How much did she tell you?” Crowley says suspiciously.

“Well, it took her a long time to teach me how to make that soup,” Aziraphale says ominously and then kisses Crowley’s pouting mouth. “Oh, hush, it’s only because we love you.”

Crowley breathes in sharply through his nose. “You really love me?” he says, trying to be casual, failing.

“You don’t know how many letters I’ve written to you and never sent,” Aziraphale says. “How many poems I’ve copied out because they reminded me of you.”

“Oh?” Crowley says, breathless, flushing.

“’My love. My life,’” Aziraphale says in his quoting voice. “’What I would give to be the only pile of ashes here. What I would give to be a sleeping body beside you,’” and then, “’The center of every poem is this: I have loved you. I have had to deal with that.’”

Crowley smacks him on the shoulder. “Flattering.”

“I have had every single emotion it is possible to experience about you,” Aziraphale says seriously, smoothing his knuckles down Crowley’s cheek.

“It may take me a while to believe you,” Crowley admits.

“Well, we have all the time in the world, my darling,” Aziraphale says, smiling, thumb resting on the patch of scales behind Crowley’s ear.

Crowley smiles back, helplessly, all the joyful possibilities of the future unfurling in front of him: holding hands at the park, kissing over dessert, a cottage just for the two of them so Crowley never has to leave Aziraphale’s side ever again, not even to sleep. “World enough and time,” Crowley says and Aziraphale kisses again, a third time, and after that Crowley finally stops keeping count of Aziraphale’s affections.

The rest of his life has begun, and he is home.

* * *

1\. Over the years, Crowley had acquired a certain number of items that did not meet the criteria for his—what did the kids say?—his brand and so obviously they had to go. That is to say, Crowley rented a ridiculously expensive storage unit for these ridiculously uncool items, and this unit included but was not limited to: all five (5) seasons of Sailor Moon on VHS, twelve (12) volumes of the manga, nine (9) replicas of all the sailor scouts’ transformation wands, one (1) replica of Sailor Moon’s transformation locket, an unnamable number of Sailor Moon themed cosmetics, and one (1) stuffed Luna. All of this to say, Crowley had quite liked the idea of the sailor scouts having convenient little interdimensional space pockets to hold their wands, and he had thought to himself, why shouldn’t I have one! So he did. [return to text]

2\. Especially since Aziraphale had finally put an embargo on holding things for Crowley after the time Crowley made a game of how many things Aziraphale would put in his pocket in one go if Crowley asked him politely, which included but was not limited to: three (3) pens, one (1) bottle of nail polish, 50 quid, two (2) tubes of lipstick, one (1) mouse, three (3) iguanas, four (4) cacti, and then Aziraphale had drawn the line at the flamingo, and so that was that. [return to text]

3\. That bloody play, Crowley would never stop banging his head against a wall over it—it got ground into the very fabric of English society and therefore Crowley, like grime in between tile grout, and now he can’t stop accidentally quoting his own bloody miracle. [return to text]

4\. Aziraphale thought he looked rather more constipated than frightening. [return to text]

5\. Also housed in his storage unit, otherwise known as the “Crowley bought this because it made him think of Aziraphale, but he can’t give it to him because it’s too excessive” pile. [return to text]

6\. Crowley had been trying not to be as obvious in his affections, so all pet names that had fallen under the radar before were now off the table. Thank somebody both words started with the letter A—really, as all of Crowley’s life-defining moments had. Crowley liked to eat an apple every decade or so in remembrance of Eve. [return to text]

7\. Truthfully, Aziraphale sees Crowley’s shenanigans coming from several miles away, but Crowley just does seem to enjoy these little games so much. [return to text]

8\. Aziraphale thinks that snakes must be like cats and as such, while it may not seem like it, has been picking his battles with Crowley since 1201 when his efforts to convince Crowley to use proper table manners in front of the King had led to one of the most severe games of chicken Aziraphale had ever played in his life, which ended in both of them banned from the entire country of England until the King died. [return to text]

9\. Long story short, never play poker with Aziraphale. [return to text]

10\. Aziraphale actually hates it because he doesn’t like cherries—too tart.[return to text]

11\. The last time Crowley won Monopoly—keeping in mind he has a win ratio of 1:100 against Aziraphale—Crowley had to drink sour wine for three whole days.[return to text]

12\. Fuck horses. They know what they did.[return to text]

13\. Crowley and Aziraphale are both terrible with geography, mostly because it keeps changing—they don’t even try to keep up with what Russia’s doing at this point.[return to text]

14\. Crowley and Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr had gotten into so many arguments that Crowley still had the notebook with the tallies of wins and losses—at this point, Crowley had to admit to his error and that Jean was correct when he said the more things change, the more they stay the same. [return to text]

15\. Which he did for a perilous five seconds until Aziraphale dumped water on his head. Crowley was so unused to this particular emotional cocktail that his corporation became confused and thought it was having a stroke for an entire twenty minutes.[return to text]

16\. Crowley once engaged in a long, demoralizing campaign to have Aziraphale watch Captain America, and when Steve Rogers was very attractively lifting a motorcycle—a real selling point in Crowley’s opinion--Aziraphale merely raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “What?” Crowley had said. “Oh, nothing,” Aziraphale said, pretending to inspect his perfect nails. “No, really, angel, what,” Crowley said, sitting up. “Well, it’s just,” Aziraphale said, in his most polite—and therefore most disdainful—tones, “he’s not really that strong, is he, I could do that in my sleep.” Crowley had flushed to the tip of his nose, breathless, at the idea of—well, Aziraphale leisurely punching people in between sips of tea. All of this to say, Aziraphale was very, very strong.[return to text]

17\. Crowley liked to throw a little oil on the fire sometimes for attention. What? Don’t judge him.[return to text]

18\. Hypocritical, really, considering he ignited said fire. [return to text]

19\. He should have known the coffee was a trick to keep him from leaving immediately.[return to text]

20\. “That’s an incredibly long last name,” Zelda observes. “Exactly why I didn’t take it,” Amelia says tartly, winning that particular verbal match.[return to text]

21\. Crowley and Zelda met when she was fifteen and holding onto the last millimetre of life after having been thrown into a mass grave after the gas chambers; her hair was shorn, her face blotchy red with burst capillaries, and she was surrounded by the bodies of dead boys. Crowley usually liked to tell Aziraphale that he had just been walking by but the truth was that in those days, Crowley had spent quite a bit of time wandering around the graves for proof of life. He didn’t even think, just pulled her out, healing her as soon as he laid hands on her; she gasped in a breath, looked at him for a long panicked moment, before snatching the sunglasses off his face. “Oi, excuse you,” Crowley said indignantly. “You’re a—you’re a demon,” she said, incredulous, and then threw her head back and laughed. “What the fuck?” Crowley said plainly. “I’m going to have to tell my brother he owes me fifty schillings,” she said. “He was going to be a rabbi.” And then burst into tears because her brother—her entire family—was dead. Crowley had held her for a long time.[return to text]

22\. Grace Chen used to be the young upstart down the street that Zelda seethed over because somehow she always got to the market first and picked over the best produce—even worse, Grace Chen’s food made Zelda cry from pure, brutal excellence, which Zelda claimed was the reason she forced unsuspecting victims into picking up food for her so Grace would never know. This was the start of Crowley eating at Beijing Roses and fifty years later, Zelda still liked to grumble that Crowley was a traitor, and Amelia always reminded her it was all her own fault. [return to text]

23\. Grace had spent many years married to a bullish, taciturn man that she cooked for in the restaurant kitchen he owned. The restaurant had been Grace’s father’s, and he had trained Grace in everything he knew because she had the talent and the will her brothers lacked. And when her father died, he left the restaurant to her husband anyway. [return to text]

24\. “Oh, back in the forties, no one even washed their hands,” Crowley would say, waving his hands around. “Sepsis up the wazoo, back then!” Connie thought he was talking about the 1940’s, but it was really the 1540’s. Either way, she became an avid hand washer.[return to text]

25\. Geographically, anyway. If London was a pile of shit, Jerusalem was a pile of rocks.[return to text]

26\. He wanted to call Aziraphale to come fix this, but Aziraphale had spent the last fifty years in bloody Russia, and Crowley figured that was enough suffering.[return to text]

27\. Hell, of course, had not understood the psychological implications of allowing mathematics to thrive and had given him a low quarterly review. Only Lucifer understood his ideas, which Crowley tried not to think about too hard.[return to text]

28\. The Bentley stops purring when faced with the incredibly steep cobblestone slopes—at one point, they’re almost at a ninety degree angle and Crowley feels like a very downmarket vampire.[return to text]

29\. The old man—Berat Tekin—was just hoping the baklava would soak up some of the coffee, even accounting for potential sugar rushes. [return to text]

30\. Unless God just believed in the inherent value of thoroughness, which Crowley seriously doubted, considering all the time She spent asking him if the sun really had to be that hot, couldn’t he just—do a work-around, She was on a deadline here, come on. He had finally sent Her a 543 paged memo on the importance of microclimates and said at the end, “So unless you want the humans to make like ICICLES, you will let me do my job,” which had earned him a penalty from Gabriel. But God had only sent Crowley back a rude sculpture—repurposing the memo pages--involving Crowley and icicles.[return to text]

31\. Mathematic proofs have finally bitten him in the arse. Perhaps—was Aziraphale actually right that evil plants the seeds of its own destruction? ([32]).[return to text]

32\. Nah. [return to text]

33\. At this very moment, Aziraphale is actually seated in front of Grace at the Beijing Roses after Grace had knocked on his door because she hadn’t seen Crowley for his weekly soup run and was worried. As Crowley was surprisingly reliable, Aziraphale also found himself a little worried. “You didn’t think anything of it, did you,” she says, pouring him hot jasmine tea into a tiny white porcelain cup. “Should I have?” he says curiously, sipping his tea. She looks at him, intent, still, like an old and powerful lion, and it makes Aziraphale uneasy. “I know what it’s like to be afraid,” she says, conversational. “But you’re letting that get in the way.” Aziraphale contemplates pretending not to know what she’s talking about but also doesn’t want to goad her into actually saying it explicitly. “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” he says finally. “You’ve hurt him deeply, and in ways I don’t think you’re even aware of,” Grace says, pouring Aziraphale more tea. He hates how good it is. “You over-step your bounds,” he says stiffly. “I’ve known Crowley a very long time,” she says, which is when Aziraphale accidentally shatters the cup with his grip. “I’ve known him longer,” Aziraphale snaps. “Then act like it,” Grace says calmly. [return to text]

34\. Crowley was still an angel, here, and he had first met Lilith when he was sneaking down to earth, yearning to see what he had made from a different perspective. This was when Lilith had discovered him crouching in a tree, staring at the stars. [return to text]

35\. Aziraphale rears back, as if slapped. “You don’t—you have no idea how hard I’ve tried to—to protect him,” he says, trying not to let his face crumple. “You’re right, I don’t,” she says, passing her full cup to Aziraphale. “But I do know it can’t go on like this.” “What has he said?” Aziraphale whispers. “He hasn’t said anything,” Grace says. “But how come you didn’t notice he was gone?” Aziraphale doesn’t answer. “Do you even know where he is right now?” Aziraphale is forced to shake his head, his eyes pricking with tears. “You’ll lose him anyway if you keep going like this,” Grace says, not without sympathy. “Is that what you want?” “Absolutely not,” Aziraphale says, wiping his face with a handkerchief he’s had for decades. It has a little green embroidered snake. “Then it’s time to act differently,” Grace says. Aziraphale stares down at the remains of his cup. “I don’t know how,” he says finally. “We can start with soup,” she says, giving a short nod, like a military general. Aziraphale blinks in surprise. “You’re helping me?” he says. Grace laughs. “How do you think I know how all this goes?” she says, wry. “This is the wisdom of experience speaking.” How odd, Aziraphale thinks, for a human to know far more than him when he’s the one that’s as old as the earth.[return to text]

36\. He got shot in the arse.[return to text]

37\. Slavic grandmothers know how to do it.[return to text]

38\. Aziraphale pretended to hate it, on principle as an adopted English-person, but his hatred was as thin and easily cracked as the sugar shell of a crème brulee.[return to text]

39\. Crowley has always greatly admired the wizard Howl, so he only holds off from leaking slime because he does not want to clean his couch.[return to text]

40\. Crowley doesn’t realize it, but his disappointment is written plainly across his face.[return to text]

41\. Then Aziraphale has to bring him the hot water bottle because Crowley’s tummy hurts from eating too much.[return to text]

42\. Zelda and Amelia own the best delicatessen in the country (England not being large, of course) but the cooking world was reluctant to give a star to a cramped little Jewish deli run by women; also, where constant swearing could be heard in the kitchen because it was located so closely to the customers. Grace had fought tooth and nail for hers, quite literally by socking several deeply entitled male chefs in the face.[return to text]

43\. Aziraphale and the witches three have actually only met a handful of times by mutual and silent agreement (even though it makes Aziraphale sometimes want to die inside because their food is divine) because they implicitly understand Crowley’s private desire to have them in separate boxes, even if Crowley would never say it.[return to text]

44\. Crowley stares at her sadly because it’s the obvious sort of cheating Aziraphale likes to engage in just to piss people off. Grace and Zelda cackle in the background. Amelia eventually shoves a lemon hamantaschen in Crowley’s face in self-defense.[return to text]

45\. It’s easy to fall into the wrong crowd and ask the wrong questions when you’re unhappy and alone and no one will give you answers about anything. [return to text]

46\. Some people are just suited to being double-named.[return to text]

47\. Lilith, his first two children. Eve had worried about something she couldn’t name but saw in Adam’s eyes for years and years after Abel died. Then one year Adam said, “Wait, before you take all of the apples,” and then he’d taken one singular bite out of the largest one. “There,” he said and grinned, and that was when Eve knew she could finally stop being afraid.[return to text]

48\. Crowley actually has quite a number of feelings regarding Tigger, and Aziraphale politely pretends not to notice.[return to text]

49\. His heart literally stops at this point in shock.[return to text]

50\. Crowley has never understood why God correlates faith with love—he lost faith in Her, but he never stopped loving her, even though She stopped loving him.[return to text]


	2. Coda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The grandmothers collect on their bet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please forgive the lack of jumping footnotes--there are only seven so hopefully it won't be too onerous! in any case, this will make more sense if you've read the first chapter. CODAAA

“Ah, my grandson!” Zelda says theatrically as Crowley and Aziraphale come in from out of the rain. “Look, everyone, my grandson,” she commands the two lone customers eating breakfast at the bar. Grace is also seated at the bar, absolutely destroying a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and Nova Scotia lox.

“Which…one?” a middle-aged man in a suit says hesitantly.

Zelda stares at him. “Isn’t it obvious?”

The man hunches in on himself as if making himself a smaller target will make Zelda forget he’s there.

Amelia comes through the swinging door of the kitchen and sighs. “Zelda, stop terrifying Mr. Lee, it’s not nice.”

Zelda narrows her eyes at Mr. Lee. “You may have won the fantasy football league this year,” she says in a low voice. “But next year I will crush you.”

“How much do you regret introducing her to fantasy football?” Grace says to Amelia conversationally.

Amelia looks at her sadly. “Not as much as I regret winning in 2012.” (1)

“Hello, grandson,” Grace says, smirking, as Aziraphale and Crowley sit next to her.

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve had your fun,” Crowley says, waving a hand at her. “Angel, do you want to—"

“Hey, I haven’t gotten to say it,” Amelia says and then when they all look at her, she breaks out into an evil grin to rival Zelda’s. “Hello, terrible grandson.” She pauses. “And grandson’s husband.”

Crowley squawks like a chicken. “We’re not—we’re—” He looks at Aziraphale with a rapidly paling face. “I mean—”

Aziraphale pets his hair. “You should probably breathe, my dear,” Aziraphale advises before actually _winking_ at him (2).

“Wuh—buh—” Crowley says.

“Shall I have one of everything then?” Aziraphale directs to Amelia. “Ooh, and an extra helping of latkes, please.”

“Sour cream or apple sauce?” Zelda says. “There _is_ a correct answer, and you will be graded accordingly.”

“It’s apple sauce,” Grace says helpfully.

Zelda looks at her in outrage. “It is absolutely not!” she says, giving herself away.

“I’ll have the sour cream then,” Aziraphale says smoothly.

Zelda turns to glare at him. “I’m watching you,” she mouths and makes the hand gesture—Amelia really has to stop introducing her to….things, in general, as a whole—and bustles off into the kitchen to terrorize her cooks.

“Apple sauce is the best, Zelda’s taste buds are wrong,” Crowley says in a low voice so Zelda won’t sense his betrayal, and Grace high-fives him.

“Both have their place,” Aziraphale lectures and then goes on to explain in great detail the advantages and disadvantages of both apple sauce and sour cream until Amelia and Grace look deeply impressed against their will and Crowley wants to both die of boredom and also love.

Zelda—and several of her employees—come out bearing plates and plates of food, setting up trays behind the counter to hold all of it. Aziraphale looks at it in an intensely covetous—almost lascivious--manner, as if he is a dark pirate and the food is a magical golden crown that guarantees perpetual wealth. Crowley thinks Azirpahale might actually be crying. “Where to start, where to start,” he frets, rubbing his hands together.

Amelia immediately starts piling food onto one plate while Grace tag-teams with a second plate, turning the plate so the latkes are in front of Aziraphale. Zelda sets a singular bowl of matzah ball soup in front of Crowley.

Aziraphale begins by delicately spooning sour cream onto a latke, which for some reason reminds Crowley of eating caviar with Aziraphale in Russia when they’d both been holed up in Uglich sometime after the serf uprising against Catherine the Great (3). “I am having a spiritual experience,” Aziraphale announces, blasphemous, after he takes his first bite. “But do you know what would go well with this?” Zelda looks as if she’s deeply considering biting Aziraphale like the feral creature she is when Aziraphale says, “Caviar.”

At that, Zelda turns speculative and greedy, like a dragon thinking about precious metals. “Tell me more,” she invites, as Amelia smiles fondly into her tea and Grace raises her eyebrows at Crowley, presumably at Aziraphale’s simultaneous gall and brilliance.

Aziraphale descends upon the rest of the food like a very neat, polite locust until every single plate is clean. The grandmothers look at him in both horror and approval.

“You must keep bringing him around, Anthony,” Grace says eventually. “He’s very good for business.”

“Anthony?” Aziraphale says primly, but his eyes are gleeful.

“Shut up,” Crowley grumbles, turning red.

“Does this mean I have an invitation to the _Beijing Roses_?” Aziraphale says to Grace.

Grace opens her mouth to respond, but Zelda says, severe, “Your invitation is contingent based on a series of questions, and your answers _will_ be considered by committee.”

“Of course, I expect nothing less,” Aziraphale says, nodding, and Zelda immediately starts interrogating him with Amelia closely supervising (4).

“It’s good you brought him here,” Grace says in a low voice to Crowley. Both of them are watching Zelda and Aziraphale like it's a tennis match.

Crowley shrugs. “It was time, I suppose.”

“Zelda will come around faster when she knows him better,” Grace remarks. “But I’m glad you have him.”

Crowley looks at her, eyebrows drawing together. “Why’d you really teach him the soup?” he says.

“Well, how old am I, Anthony?” Grace sighs.

“How should I know, you old bat,” Crowley says, taking a sip of coffee.

Grace snorts. “I know you know,” she says.

“Don’t,” Crowley lies.

“Anyway, the point is, I'm not getting any younger,” Grace says before Crowley can get her off track with a stupid argument. “You know where this is going, don’t you.”

“I think maybe I have to leave—” Crowley starts to say, and Grace snags him by the hand, curling small, strong chef’s hands around his large, fragile ones.

“We’re not going to be around forever, Crowley,” she says.

“Kshh, kshh, what’s that, you’re breaking up, I can’t hear you, kshhh kshhhh,” he says.

“And you’re terrible at being alone,” she says. “Aziraphale told me that, so don’t argue.”

Crowley looks at her mulishly. “Kshh,” he says.

“You’re an idiot,” she says. “But you’re Aziraphale’s idiot now, and I can finally worry less about you.” She pats his hand before releasing him.

“You got any whiskey for this coffee?” Crowley says to Zelda, who grabs a bottle from behind the counter and tosses it to him without even pausing in her stand-off with Aziraphale. Aziraphale looks like he is deeply enjoying himself, sparring with Zelda, being fed by Amelia, approved of by Grace.

It takes Crowley a few moments to realize that what he is feeling is pure, uncut happiness, and he sits back into it, surrounded by all the people he loves, drinking his half-arsed Irish coffee.

#

Crowley has just parked the Bentley at the bookshop in his usual (illegal) space, the rain pouring even harder in the interim drive from the deli, and Aziraphale says, “Wait, let’s just sit here.”

“Why?” Crowley says, but he takes his hand from the door.

“Let’s watch the rain together,” Aziraphale says, smiling at him. “It’ll be like the first time.”

“Except you can’t get your wings out in the car,” Crowley says, pragmatically.

“Oh, you want me to drape my wing over you?” Aziraphale says slyly.

Crowley turns bright red, sputters.

“How about an arm instead then?” Aziraphale suggests, and somehow slides over to sit right next to Crowley, thighs pressed together, even though there shouldn’t be any room to do that. Crowley leans into him, and Aziraphale rests his head on Crowley’s shoulder—all of Crowley’s height is in his legs, so sitting places them at a fairly even height, enough so that Aziraphale has to bodily curl around Crowley to place his arm around him.

They watch the rain through the car windows in silence, the world a study in muted, blurry gray, heat blasting from the vents, Freddie Mercury singing, “Under Pressure,” with David Bowie.

“I love humanity,” Aziraphale starts.

“But?” Crowley says.

“It’s a shame God instituted lifespan limits after the first thousand years,” Aziraphale says wistfully.

“The world would be over-populated,” Crowley says. “Then you’d have to move to space and avoid all the space whales and the voracious appetites of black holes.”

“Black holes aren’t alive,” Aziraphale laughs.

Crowley looks at him grimly.

“…why would you do such a thing?” Aziraphale says

“Seemed like a laugh at the time,” Crowley sighs (5).

Aziraphale resolutely looks out the window again. “Well, at least the soul never dies, I suppose,” he says.

“Not the same,” Crowley says, adamant.

“No visiting,” Aziraphale agrees.

“Who would you want to see?” Crowley asks.

“Well, dear Oscar, of course,” Aziraphale says immediately enough that Crowley’s long-intact jealousy rears its head again.

“He was a fool,” Crowley says, wrinkling his nose.

Aziraphale gives him a reproving look. “Crowley.”

“What, he was,” Crowley says, jutting out his lower lip.

“And you and Leo never did anything foolish at all, ever,” Aziraphale says. “You weren’t like two little boys whenever you got together, doing all kinds of dangerous, stupid—”

“Okay, okay,” Crowley mutters but in his heart, he settles into well-worn petulance and bruised feelings.

Aziraphale sighs and turns Crowley’s face toward him with his hands. “I never quite understood your issue with Oscar,” he says. “He loved someone else very deeply.”

“I don’t care about Oscar’s feelings, I care about _your_ feelings,” he says, glaring down at his lap.

Aziraphale looks a little consternated, like he can’t find the words he wants—Crowley imagines that having committed to emotional honesty, Aziraphale expected to be good at it right away because all it is is words and he’s read more than any other being that’s ever existed. But Crowley knows from experience that it can be like plucking helplessly at a tangled knot, or—or like learning a new language, in which all you know to ask is the location of the restroom, and everything else is frustratingly out of reach, one’s mouth a useless, empty thing.

“ ‘i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true),’” Aziraphale says. “No, that’s not quite right.”

“You can take your time, angel,” Crowley says, left side of his mouth tilting up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But I want to get it right,” Aziraphale says, scowling.

“It’s good enough that you’re trying,” Crowley says. “You don’t have to be perfect.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale says and to Crowley’s horror, his eyes fill with tears.

“What, no, don’t do that,” Crowley says helplessly. “I got it wrong, didn’t I, oh shit, I didn’t mean—”

Aziraphale laughs. “No, Crowley, it’s the opposite, you got it very right.”

“Oh,” Crowley says. “Good.”

“Oh drat, there’s never going to be a good moment for this,” Aziraphale says, fumbling in his pockets.

“What—” Crowley starts to say when Aziraphale triumphantly produces a ring. It is thin and bright gold like a new farthing.

“For—for six thousand years, the thing I have looked most forward to seeing has always been you,” Aziraphale begins. “I’d think to myself, oh, this sea urchin is delicious, I wish I could share it with Crowley, and then I’d think about when I could see you next. I’d ration it out because I knew I couldn’t do it too often or Heaven would know, but you—you just popped in whenever you liked, and I’d always know when you were getting close because the amount of love you carried with you was as big as an ocean.”

“Oh,” Crowley says again, his voice a croak.

“Oscar knew,” Aziraphale continues. “He teased you too much with it, but that was only because he knew I felt the same way and wanted to goad you into doing something about it.” Aziraphale takes a breath. “But now I can do something about it myself, and it is—it is with the greatest pleasure and honor and love that I want to ask you to marry me.”

Crowley is so stunned that he just gapes, his tongue going inoperable, like the useless serpent he is.

“I love you,” Aziraphale says, his voice breaking on the word love. “I have loved you, I will love you, and I will never tire of eating with you, sleeping with you, fighting with you, playing with you—”

“Yes,” Crowley says, crying himself now. “Yes, yes, angel, of course, I never thought I could have this, I can’t believe it—”

Aziraphale takes several tries to put the ring on Crowley’s finger because he’s weeping too much to see clearly and when he’s finally successful, they both can’t take their eyes off of it.

“We’ll have to go to the storage unit,” Crowley says finally.

“How come?” Aziraphale says, looking up at him.

“That’s where—uh, all the rings are,” Crowley confesses.

Aziraphale raises an eyebrow. “How many do you have?”

“At least—at least ten,” Crowley prevaricates because it actually probably is in the hundreds by now because he just can’t resist.

“I see,” Aziraphale says too knowingly.

Crowley kisses him to distract him from how embarrassing he is as a person, and Aziraphale winds his hands in Crowley’s hair and they kiss and kiss until they have to flee inside for need of a bed and thorough celebration of their engagement. It’s as Aziraphale lays next to him, book already in hand, sheets pooling in his lap, that Crowley thinks how he’s never felt so known, how Aziraphale has cut through to the marrow of him, seen all there is to see—the kindness, the resentment, the curiosity, the shame--and shelters Crowley with himself anyway.

That’s what love really is, Crowley thinks to himself, right before falling asleep with Aziraphale (6) watching over him, as always (7).

* * *

1\. It’s just best not to talk about what happened, but it definitely involved waking up to trash-talking post-its for far too long.

2\. Aziraphale had been arguing with himself about this for both six thousand years and the last two weeks. He thought: 1. But we’re not human, would a legally-binding marriage even be meaningful in any way, which includes is but is not limited to: the legislative, the emotional, the spiritual, 2. On the other hand, it’s so terribly romantic, isn’t it, to publicly promise yourself to someone else for the rest of your life, it’s so—hopeful and lovely, 3. On the other other hand, logistics: in regard to the vow “til death do us part”, is there any consequential difference if you and your spouse are effectively eternal? Barring holy water, hell fire, and any acts of God, etc. 4. But he _loves_ Crowley and he wants to be with him forever and he’s noticed a worrying and growing desire for e _veryone else_ —including that flashy young man at the bar last night who kept trying to proposition Crowley—to know that, 5. But isn’t that merely a petty possessiveness that is beneath him and insulting to Crowley? To quote a great princess, Crowley is not merely a prize to be won—he is a person with wants and needs and autonomy, which then led him to 6. And that is that Aziraphale thinks that Crowley himself needs—and deserves—a public declaration of the love and devotion and loyalty that Aziraphale has felt for all these years but has never been able to say. In any case, all of this to say, Aziraphale has the ring in his pocket and all the grandmothers have somehow sniffed it out like rabid gossip-sensing dogs.

3\. Crowley had deeply adored Catherine the Great for her intelligence, her innovation, but Crowley thought she’d had holes in her game, namely that free will of the serfs to choose sinful action would add to Crowley’s numbers, which he sorely needed at that time. However, she had greatly misliked Crowley’s idea of liberating the serfs—she had strange, ingrained blind spots littered in between her fervent beliefs in the ideals of Englightenment—even when he promised her she’d go down in history as the greatest leader of Russia as a result. “I’m already the greatest leader,” she had said, eyes glittering with arrogance and and a pin-point sense of irony. “But if we turn to the laws of probability, it is inevitable that someone greater than I will come along.” Crowley had thrown up his hands at this point; at this point in history, Heaven hadn’t really given a shit about the ills of serfdom—Aziraphale mostly present at this point for the company--so Crowley had lost that one all on his own.

4\. Zelda says, “How do you take your coffee?” and Aziraphale answers, “I don’t frequently drink coffee but when I do, it is with cream and sugar,” to the woman who thinks that coffee has to be black as tar to qualify as coffee. “What is your preferred matzah ball texture?” she barks. “Soft but also firm,” Aziraphale says promptly. “That is to say, soft and fluffy on the outside and firmer on the inside.” Zelda nods in reluctant approval. It goes on like this for a long time.

5\. Aziraphale keeps to himself the thought that sometimes God and Crowley are far more alike than Crowley would ever want to hear.

6\. Aziraphale is running gentle fingers through his hair because he has a weird obsession with it, which has nothing to do with why Crowley has started growing it out again, no sirree.

7\. Crowley gets an incoherent voicemail from Zelda the next day and all he can catch are the words “Michelin star.” “I didn’t do that,” Crowley says to himself, frowning. He looks at Aziraphale, who suddenly looks far too innocent. “Angel,” he says warningly. “They _deserve_ it, their food is transformative,” Aziraphale says passionately. Crowley closes his eyes, sighs. “You’re the one who’s going to explain this to Zelda,” he informs Aziraphale. “Agreed,” Aziraphale chirps, and Crowley has to wonder if torturing Zelda with deserved rewards was the angel’s plan all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> credit to e.e. cummings for the poem

**Author's Note:**

> this was more of a character study than i meant it to be--all the women in crowley's long life, all of his grandmothers
> 
> edited: i forgot to add, coda of the grandmothers to come!
> 
> also credit to the poets Caitlyn Siehl, Salma Deera, and Rainer Maria Rilke, respectively


End file.
